Will Nexus 7 and Jelly Bean solve Android's tablet problems?

What's not to like?

According to Jason, Jelly Bean won't make a difference to Android tablet adoption because not all tablets will be upgraded. By contrast, he claims, "all iPads in active use will be running iOS 6" in a few months. As the owner of an iPad 1, which was still being sold new as late as last year but won't run iOS 6, I can attest to the fallacy of that argument. A developer from Epic Games recently told me how painful it was for them to support the Unreal engine across a wide range of iOS versions, but they still had to do it because some people don't or can't upgrade. Sorry, Jason, but iOS isn't as homogeneous as you think.

The Nexus 7 will get timely over-the-air upgrades direct from Google, just like the Nexus S and Xoom before it. But even if that stopped, the over 4 million members of xda-developers.com will continue to support you with custom, officially blessed Android distros for years to come.

Next, Jason argues that Android is flawed because phones and tablets "do not have the same user interface". Give a Galaxy Nexus owner a Xoom, he says, and they won't know how to use it. Ok, I'll grant you that one shows the time at the top of the screen and one shows it at the bottom of the screen. But I think he's underestimating the intelligence of the average tablet user if he believes they can't make the adjustment.

Does the 7-inch form factor have legs? Probably not, says Jason. Unless Apple makes one. Then it's a great idea and its "staying power is absolutely assured". Right.

The fact is that the Nexus 7 is a great little device that fills a need we didn't know we had. Steve Jobs said nobody would want a 7 inch iPad because the iOS user interface would be too tiny on the smaller screen. But thanks to Android's scalable UI architecture, well written Android apps can adapt to screens of any size.

Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) is an incremental update that brings better performance and features like Google Now. Between the new PDK (Platform Developers Kit) initiative and direct sales of their own branded devices, Google is making every effort to get new versions such as 4.1 in people's hands as quickly as possible. What's not to like?

Too many issues

While Jelly Bean brings a number of improvements to the Android operating system, most of which fall in the areas of system performance, the fundamental and well-known issues with Android still persist, which include a less user friendly UI than its competitor, significantly less apps than its competitor (few of which are tablet optimized) and a fundamentally broken relationship that Google has with its device OEMs and and wireless carriers which inhibit the OS updates of tablet and smartphone devices.

All in all, if these issues are not resolved in the near future, Jelly Bean will not significantly improve Android's position and market share as a tablet device operating system, sales from 7-inch tablets from Google and Amazon notwithstanding.