Difference between Tablets, palm devices, touch pads

Question

Can anybody please help me out with the difference between tablets, iPads and palm devices. I am new in this area and have no idea what are the specifics of this devices or how they differ from one another. iPad is from Apple, are there any other devices similar to iPad but are from HP or Android????

Also what is the difference in developing apps on this machines. Like if I can develop app for an iPad, will it be easy for me to develop a similar one for HP or Android device(if they have something similar to iPhone).

Answer 1

I-Pad apps can only be created on a mac PC and will likely share no code with an HP device, I believe HP do make an android laptop but not a touchpad. Touchpads similar to i-pads do exist and some do indeed run android. Take a visit to your nearest computing or electricals store and they are bound to have one.

A palm device is smaller and fits within the palm of your hand, The i-phone or a blackberry would count as a palm device. Any regular 'non' smartphone(iphones blackberrys again) also classifies but i dont believe this is what you are looking for.

Android is not a company, Android is an operating system that your code will run on. Other companies make the device which then has android installed.

Answer 2

There has been a lot of press lately about tablet devices, Apple seems to have set the pace with the iPad and the iPad 2 is rumored to be announced sometime soon.

iPad apps are written primarily in Objective-C using the iOS SDK free from Apple on the iOS Developer Center. It does cost $99 to deploy apps to a device and distribute them however. There are other tools to develop iOS applications such as MonoTouch and PhoneGap

Blackberry is about to release the Playbook which from my understanding runs Adobe Air applications.

HP just announced the Touchpad which runs WebOS, the applications are primarily built using web technologies (HTML, Javascript, etc)

Then there are a slew of devices coming out that run Android, I think the next one that will be available to consumers is the Motorola Xoom. Android apps are developed primarily in Java using the Android SDK which is free and platform independent.

This market is evolving very fast and there are a lot of players, it seems Apple has the solid ground a this point.

Developing applications for these devices can differ quite a bit, one way that you can reach all devices is by developing a tablet centric webapp such as Yahoo!'s tablet site