Until I use this, I'm going to hold off on the excitement everyone seems to have for it.
The tagline is "The Device the developer community is waiting for." That's great for the developer community. Unfortunately, the developer community is a small minority of people and honestly, people don't really care if their device is easy to develop for. People care how good their device is. If a device is easy to develop for, but it's slow, or clunky or crashes all the time or doesn't have features that people expect out of a mobile device, what's the point?
> That's great for the developer community. Unfortunately, the developer community is a small minority of people
I think you underestimate the amount of influence developers have on the rest of the population. If you get developers to love you by making their jobs that much easier, they will go out of their way to promote your product and get other people to start using it. It's in their profit-minded interests to see to it that your product succeeds, because if it doesn't, then they have to bear the costs of doing things the old way.
The quality of the product matters, too, and we'll have to see if this will be a high-quality product. But there's something to be said about getting developers on your side.
I understand your point but I don't think it's as influential as you make out.
First, you're assuming that developers have (sufficient) influence over swathes of non-developers. I'm not sure that's true, especially in the case of hardware.
Second, it's in developers' "profit-minded interest" to get their stuff on every relevant platform. It's where the customers are that matters.
Finally, no matter how good the product is, I doubt any technically capable folks (not just devs) want to end up as the de-facto 'tech-support guy' for all the people they convinced to sign-up.
Personally, I have not been waiting for another Html driven platform. I don't like Html/Css as a UI framework, I just think it's highly overrated.
Things I like better: Qt/Qml, Wpf because they are much more precise (meaning, I don't have to use an opaque type like "DIV" as a placeholder for a list-view or something else that I really wanted).
I don't necessarily think HTML and CSS make for good languages to design UIs with, but it beats the hell out of learning a new language, stack, and tools. I can use mostly the same tools and workflow to create apps as I would for making sites. That's one reason I can't wait for Windows 8. The promise of HTML5 apps, even if they're using IE as the runtime, is friggin sweet.
The tagline is "The Device the developer community is waiting for." That's great for the developer community. Unfortunately, the developer community is a small minority of people and honestly, people don't really care if their device is easy to develop for. People care how good their device is. If a device is easy to develop for, but it's slow, or clunky or crashes all the time or doesn't have features that people expect out of a mobile device, what's the point?