Ask Paul: March 13 (Premium)

Thanks no doubt to Coronavirus, this is a lighter-than-usual Ask Paul to kick off a weekend of hoarding toilet paper and not touching my face.
Android tablets
sabertooth920 asks:

Can you explain why no one can produce a truly excellent Android tablet?

This has always bothered me. I feel like there’s no one answer.

Some may recall that Google made an excellent Android mini-tablet, the Nexus 7, over two generations in 2012-2013, and I was a big fan of those tablets. Of course, as mini-tablets, app makers didn’t have to do anything for their apps to work; phone apps just worked normally on them. And the Nexus 7 certainly suffered from performance rot problems over time.

Moving to a full-sized tablet requires the platform maker, Google, to adapt the OS and developers to adapt their apps to the larger screen real estate. If you look at what Apple did with the iPad, you can see that they adapted iOS to behave somewhat differently on an iPad, and to accommodate both portrait and horizontal orientations. It adapted its own apps to showcase what was possible. And Apple’s developer base, which had seen great success on iPhone and iPod touch, embraced the iPad and its unique capabilities very quickly.

None of that really happened on Android. Part of it is Google’s problem, as it moved slowly to adapt Android and its own apps for tablets. And part of it was the developer base, which has never seemed as engaged to me on Android as is the case on iOS. Too many Android apps were/are phone apps just scaled up to fit the screen at whatever size. And then Google’s own Android tablets, the Nexus 10 and the Pixel C, were both failures.

Google’s eventual response to this was to adapt Chrome OS to run Android apps and to make touch-capable Chromebook convertibles and detachables the new Android tablets. This hasn’t worked too well, either, and Google’s Surface-like Chrome OS tablet/2-in-1, the Pixel Slate, was quickly killed. This past year, Google simply admitted to the reality of its situation and released a relatively inexpensive and mainstream clamshell Chromebook, the Pixelbook Go.

I don’t believe that Google has given up. But its inability to adapt Android to use cases beyond the phone---Android has failed or is failing on tablets, wearables, IoT, home entertainment set-top boxes, and more---is troubling. It’s also not unique: Microsoft suffered a similar problem trying to make Windows succeed over many years on non-PC devices.

I wish there was a great Android tablet (or 2-in-1). But right now, the iPad is the only truly great tablet. And I just don’t see that changing.
Galaxy S20 problems
wright_is asks:

I posted elsewhere my problem with the Galaxy S20+. Generally, it is a fine phone, but it hasn't had that "wow" effect on me, like previous upgrades, I think the 2 problems I have with it, compared to my previous phone, are what blunts my enthusiasm for it. It is a great device, but only a small step f...