Why don’t we have a 7- or 8-inch tablet with a keyboard dock

Not all of us appreciate big tablets. In fact, we’re hearing that Apple’s iPad Mini is selling like hot cupcakes and Google sold more Nexus 7 than Nexus 10 units. And we’re seeing more and more companies releasing smaller tablets. However, what I’d like to see is a dockable tablet, something like the Asus Transformer Pad series, only smaller.

Few years ago HTC launched HTC Shift, which was a full-blown Windows PC with a 7-inch screen. Later on, we’ve seen Sony’s small Vaio P laptop. Isn’t now a perfect time to launch something similar?

Sure enough, we would like it to run Android, but some form of Linux would also work. The main idea here is to create an affordable device that would have a mass appeal — unlike the two mentioned products by HTC and Sony.

Sure enough, the keyboard would be smaller – but we would adopt for that extra portability we get in return. I’m not sure why we haven’t seen a single such device thus far. And don’t tell me I can use a keyboard case, cause I can’t / don’t want to. I want to hold such device in my lap, like a regular laptop so I can type while in the park.

Recently, Acer did something similar with its Windows 8-based W3 tablet but that big keyboard dock and the fact that it doesn’t have the great hardware under the hood to run Windows smoothly kill the deal for me.

Am I asking too much? A 7- or 8-inch tablet with a keyboard dock that transforms the tablet into a small laptop sounds like a great idea to me. What do you think?

Why India Trails China

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MODERN India is, in many ways, a success. Its claim to be the world’s largest democracy is not hollow. Its media is vibrant and free; Indians buy more newspapers every day than any other nation. Since independence in 1947, life expectancy at birth has more than doubled, to 66 years from 32, and per-capita income (adjusted for inflation) has grown fivefold. In recent decades, reforms pushed up the country’s once sluggish growth rate to around 8 percent per year, before it fell back a couple of percentage points over the last two years. For years, India’s economic growth rate ranked second among the world’s large economies, after China, which it has consistently trailed by at least one percentage point.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

The hope that India might overtake China one day in economic growth now seems a distant one. But that comparison is not what should worry Indians most. The far greater gap between India and China is in the provision of essential public services — a failing that depresses living standards and is a persistent drag on growth.

Inequality is high in both countries, but China has done far more than India to raise life expectancy, expand general education and secure health care for its people. India has elite schools of varying degrees of excellence for the privileged, but among all Indians 7 or older, nearly one in every five males and one in every three females are illiterate. And most schools are of low quality; less than half the children can divide 20 by 5, even after four years of schooling.

India may be the world’s largest producer of generic medicine, but its health care system is an unregulated mess. The poor have to rely on low-quality — and sometimes exploitative — private medical care, because there isn’t enough decent public care. While China devotes 2.7 percent of its gross domestic product to government spending on health care, India allots 1.2 percent.

India’s underperformance can be traced to a failure to learn from the examples of so-called Asian economic development, in which rapid expansion of human capability is both a goal in itself and an integral element in achieving rapid growth. Japan pioneered that approach, starting after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when it resolved to achieve a fully literate society within a few decades. As Kido Takayoshi, a leader of that reform, explained: “Our people are no different from the Americans or Europeans of today; it is all a matter of education or lack of education.” Through investments in education and health care, Japan simultaneously enhanced living standards and labor productivity — the government collaborating with the market.

Despite the catastrophe of Japan’s war years, the lessons of its development experience remained and were followed, in the postwar period, by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and other economies in East Asia. China, which during the Mao era made advances in land reform and basic education and health care, embarked on market reforms in the early 1980s; its huge success changed the shape of the world economy. India has paid inadequate attention to these lessons.

Is there a conundrum here that democratic India has done worse than China in educating its citizens and improving their health? Perhaps, but the puzzle need not be a brainteaser. Democratic participation, free expression and rule of law are largely realities in India, and still largely aspirations in China. India has not had a famine since independence, while China had the largest famine in recorded history, from 1958 to 1961, when Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward killed some 30 million people. Nevertheless, using democratic means to remedy endemic problems — chronic undernourishment, a disorganized medical system or dysfunctional school systems — demands sustained deliberation, political engagement, media coverage, popular pressure. In short, more democratic process, not less.

In China, decision making takes place at the top. The country’s leaders are skeptical, if not hostile, with regard to the value of multiparty democracy, but they have been strongly committed to eliminating hunger, illiteracy and medical neglect, and that is enormously to their credit.

There are inevitable fragilities in a nondemocratic system because mistakes are hard to correct. Dissent is dangerous. There is little recourse for victims of injustice. Edicts like the one-child policy can be very harsh. Still, China’s present leaders have used the basic approach of accelerating development by expanding human capability with great decisiveness and skill.

The case for combating debilitating inequality in India is not only a matter of social justice. Unlike India, China did not miss the huge lesson of Asian economic development, about the economic returns that come from bettering human lives, especially at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid. India’s growth and its earnings from exports have tended to depend narrowly on a few sectors, like information technology, pharmaceuticals and specialized auto parts, many of which rely on the role of highly trained personnel from the well-educated classes. For India to match China in its range of manufacturing capacity — its ability to produce gadgets of almost every kind, with increasing use of technology and better quality control — it needs a better-educated and healthier labor force at all levels of society. What it needs most is more knowledge and public discussion about the nature and the huge extent of inequality and its damaging consequences, including for economic growth.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate, is a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard. He is the author, with Jean Drèze, of “An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions.”

Why Apple Killed Genius For Apps, And What’s Next For The App Store’s Long Tail

Apple is no longer offering the “Genius” feature as a way to surface and discover new mobile applications in the iOS App Store in the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7. Instead, the spot that used to belong to “Genius” now goes to “Near Me,” a new feature demoed during yesterday’s keynote at WWDC, which recommends apps based on your location.

This is a significant change from iOS 6, where the “Genius” option not only had a button at the bottom of the iOS App Store’s homescreen, it was also the button directly in the center – the one that invites users to tap it first.

App recommendations have been a tough business for many third-parties, and it seems that even Apple, too, is still experimenting with ways to make those recommendations more useful. But by introducing “Near Me” in favor of “Genius,” Apple has essentially given up on offering more personalized recommendations to users based on their preferences, and instead is providing only generalized app recommendations based on a user’s current location.

During the keynote, for example, the “Near Me” feature was demoed in the context of someone who is traveling. And certainly, launching the iOS App Store to find apps for nearby hotels, restaurants or attractions will be handy at certain times. But this isn’t an everyday need, so it’s curious why “Near Me” still gets the center position in the new store. After all, most users looking for new apps hit up the charts or the App Store’s Featured section, where algorithmic and curated lists like “What’s Hot” or “New and Noteworthy” offer better selections.

More Opportunity For Discovery Services?

The removal of “Genius” for apps comes at a time when Apple has been cracking down on alternative app discovery resources. In recent months, Apple has been accused by some – mainly the afflicted – of shutting down discovery services like App Gratis and App Shopper (the latter which later returned after changes), as if under some blanket policy designed to bring all tools for new app discovery in-house.

But that’s clearly not the case – if anything, the removal of “Genius” for apps now gives third-parties more opportunities to step in and try to fulfill users’ needs.

Apple’s policy against app discovery services,first enacted last fall, is there not to disallow these services, but serves as a warning to developers who are attempting to manipulate App Store charts for profit. The guidelines may have read that apps recommending other apps besides the developers’ own “would be rejected,” but Apple is using that clause to selectively dismiss those apps it knows are breaking the unspoken rules.

Other apps operating safely in this space include longtime app discovery source Apps fire and relative newcomer Hubbl, for example, neither of which have experienced the same troubles. In fact, Hubbl co-founder Archana Patch irajan tells us that their newest app update was approved in just three days for App Store release.

Why Genius Didn’t Work For Apps

The app recommendations market has seen some upheaval, and not just because of Apple’s rejections. Some of those operating services in the space, like Crosswalk for example, have since pivoted to other businesses while others shut down. Many that remain are still niche players. Apple itself hasn’t made any public moves, until now with the debut of “Near Me,” to offer any sort of new take on app recommendations. And it hasn’t acquired any startups the way it once did with Chomp in order to better understand the  challenges and possibilities in app recommendations.

But at least it has admitted by the removal of  ”Genius” (for apps - it’s still there in iOS 7 for Music), that its earlier system just didn’t work.

Appsfire co-founder Ouriel Ohayon thinks that Apple’s version of recommendations had never resonated with users because “both the experience and the recommendations were not that relevant,” he says. “Apps were mostly recommended based on what you downloaded versus what you really need and like (taste-based). What you download is not a signal of what you want next. Discovery is more than that,” Ohayon adds.

Users also probably didn’t see the need for “Genius” since they were already turning to the charts for Apple’s recommendations. And when they were looking for apps similar to those they have already installed, the “Related” section within each app’s listing page serves that purpose – and it remains in iOS 7, too.

Like myself, Ohayon also questions “Near Me’s” now prominent position in the App Store, which seems to be an indicator of just how much Apple is struggling to figure out personalized recommendations. “It is not a natural way of thinking. It is probably a good secondary discovery mechanism which could have been part of Genius,” Ohayon says.

Patchirajan agrees that Apple’s “Genius” mechanism had long fallen short of app discovery’s potential because what really works for personalized recommendations is a combination of several factors, not just a focus on “people who like X also like Y,” or your location, as “Near Me” now calls for.

Instead, a recommendation algorithm should look for a number of other signals too, including apps users own, users’ social profiles, users’ interest profiles, and situational awareness. “You need to have rich meta data around apps – just the category and keywords about apps is not enough,” says Patchirajan.

Impact On Developers Is Minimal

Though developers running businesses in this space will be biased against Apple’s own capabilities with regards to app recommendations, the broader consensus among those we’ve spoken with in the industry is that the removal of “Genius” won’t have a major impact on developers, in terms of having apps found by users and then gaining higher rankings.

Explains MobileDevHQ CEO Ian Sefferman, “from the marketer perspective, Genius was a hard nut to crack. Because it was so personalized, there was very little way to ensure that you get your app noticed within a user’s Genius recommendations.” (However, he believes the “Near Me” feature can potentially turn into another “Top Chart.”)

App downloads are still largely powered by Apple’s charts and Featured sections, not its experimental recommendation sections like “Genius,” and likely not the forthcoming “Near Me,” either. From what we’re hearing in terms of app store SEO (ASO, as it’s often called), not much has changed in iOS 7. Search appears to be basically the same from cursory glances. (Research into keywords and algorithm improvements will take some time).

The new iOS App Store “Wishlist” feature – something which has long since been an option in the desktop version of iTunes –  has now made its way to mobile, but that also isn’t likely to push apps through the charts since it’s basically a list of “maybes.”

For developers, unfortunately, it looks like more of the same.

Apple has reached 900,000 iOS applications, but its $10 billion in revenue paid to app developers is increasingly being concentrated at the top of the charts. Only 2 percent of the top iPhone publishers in the U.S. are newcomers, as it becomes harder than ever to break into the top charts.

Apple will eventually have to figure out a better recommendations system if it wants to cater to the ever-growing number of app developers who are still launching new creations in the hopes of being a part of the App Store gold rush, which is showing no signs of slowing down.

If it does not, those developers could turn their focus to Android. Google Play today growing at a faster rate on both downloads and revenues than Apple’s App Store, having jumped from 19 percent in total app revenue between it and Apple’s App Store last November, to 27 percent this April. Google Play also offers a larger consumer market share, and a slightly more welcoming platform for newcomer developers. However, the store has historically struggled to generate revenue for its developers, something which Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out yesterday referencing a number of data points indicating how much more engaged iOS users were with their devices.

But at the end of the day, Google/Android doesn’t have to have its entire user base obsessed with their phones – it just has to grow its user base large enough to drive a significant number of downloads, then payments and revenue for developers will follow by nature of its size and scale.

Meanwhile, keeping Apple’s app-dicted users with a steady stream of new apps to try will become something that Apple can’t leave to occasional tools like “Near Me” and  its App Store charts forever.