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by StavrosK
5074 days ago
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I think we half-agree on this one. I didn't mean what ROI Google will have strictly in terms of dollars, mindshare/market share/etc are all great to have. However, I don't think that great graphics drivers are as important as you think. It seems to me that Google can (very cheaply) pick the low-hanging fruit in graphics performance and get 80% of the way there, and then see what they need to do. Also having a "Google" line of devices is very beneficial, as it can be the high end of the Android offerings. I'm typing this reply on a Galaxy Nexus, and I find the phone much better than an iPhone by far (in general, not just in performance, I haven't used an iPhone recently and don't remember how responsive my 3G was). There's also a false dichotomy in your post that I need to point out. You say that the money will either go to a graphics driver or will sit in the bank, which is trivially false, as Google can invest it in many other ways. |
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To the 80% question, my claim is that this is exactly what Google did, they got 80% of the way there and in phones that worked. In tablets however the additional screen real estate magnified this weakness in graphics below the 'good enough' threshold. It was great that the Nexus 7 made great strides in this area, the Nexus 7 is manufactured by Asus (which made the Transformer Prime, and now the Transformer Infinity) that the graphics did not improve until Google made it the 'Google Nexus 7' (which sounds like they drove more of the decisions) was a problem for the Android ecosystem in general.
My thesis is that 'fixing' it so that Asus and anyone else can build a fabulous graphics experience on Android is possibly the best investment they could make.