For a long as the computer had existed our imaginations have exceeded our capacity to express it. When the personal computer came around in the 1980s, Steve Jobs was one of the first to realize that computers could (and should) display text in more than one font. Displays running 640x480 pixels at a ridiculously low pixels-per-inch were the standard for over a decade. Then the Pentium set new standards with 1024x768 displays and Windows 95 entered a new era of visual computing. The world wide web connected us like never before and experienced a revolution of it's own when Steve Jobs again rocked the world with the iPhone. (Remember a wide screen iPod, a phone, and a revolutionary internet device, on YouTube here.) iOS and Android made us drool over our phones, but the software continued to press the envelope of what was possible given the available hardware. And the hardware was usually dumb looking. It rarely looked like technology of the future. The iPhone 4, the iPhone 6 and exceedingly rare other devices were worthy of science fiction writing from the 20th century.
I saw this year's model of Samsung's Galaxy Tab S3 at the store today. It is beautiful. It puts an iPad to shame. It was clearly designed by the same company that made the S8 (set for release 2 weeks from today, I preordered it tonight).
It's impossible to explain how glorious it feels and looks. The feel of matching glass on front and back is just amazing. The nuance of how they made the side frame metal and match the color and tone of the glass makes for a wonderful unibody appearance that exceeds the iPad because it affords the strength of metal on the edge and the look, sheen, and feel of glass on the front and back. It truly looks like something that is a work of science fiction, like something that jumped right of the screen from Tron Legacy or Star Trek. (iPad's curved back may make it easy to pick up off a table, but that's the end of the pros.)
Running more than full HD and 9.7 inches diagonal with an HDR display and four built in speakers, and a processor that delivers silky smooth graphics (I don't even care what the processors is, it delivers) this thing pumps out the sensory experience to the max (for a tablet). But it's running Android. Not that I dislike Android, I like it better than iOS and to an extent Windows. But for a piece of hardware like this, Android 7 visually presents the experience of a child's toy from the early 2000's. iOS would too if you somehow forced it on there, and so would Windows. Now that our hardware has almost caught up to my design expectations (both the S8 phone and this S3 tablet) it's time for someone to theme Android in such a way that the OS lives up to the hardware. A game that hardware manufactures have been playing catch-up on for a decade and this year finally took the upper hand. At least Samsung has. Now we'll see if anyone else follows suit.
I saw this year's model of Samsung's Galaxy Tab S3 at the store today. It is beautiful. It puts an iPad to shame. It was clearly designed by the same company that made the S8 (set for release 2 weeks from today, I preordered it tonight).
Running more than full HD and 9.7 inches diagonal with an HDR display and four built in speakers, and a processor that delivers silky smooth graphics (I don't even care what the processors is, it delivers) this thing pumps out the sensory experience to the max (for a tablet). But it's running Android. Not that I dislike Android, I like it better than iOS and to an extent Windows. But for a piece of hardware like this, Android 7 visually presents the experience of a child's toy from the early 2000's. iOS would too if you somehow forced it on there, and so would Windows. Now that our hardware has almost caught up to my design expectations (both the S8 phone and this S3 tablet) it's time for someone to theme Android in such a way that the OS lives up to the hardware. A game that hardware manufactures have been playing catch-up on for a decade and this year finally took the upper hand. At least Samsung has. Now we'll see if anyone else follows suit.
Image credits: Samsung