Computex 2010 Tablet PC Round-Up With Video

MojoKid writes "At Computex 2010, devices like the Eee Pad and Eee Tablet were all the rage. Of course the bulk of these were Intel Atom-based systems, but there were a number of NVIDIA Tegra 2-based models in the mix as well. What is glaringly apparent on all of these tablets — and absent on the iPad — are the multitude of connectivity options built into them, like USB ports, flash card readers, and video output ports. Obviously, from a hardware perspective, the iPad is a sexy device; but Apple's true mastery is that of the user interface. The first big player that steps up with something competitive to Apple in that regard will have the pole position in 2010's race for the hot re-emergent tablet market." Reader Raikus adds an opinionated summary of winners and losers at "Tabletpalooza," i.e. Computex 2010.

Comments

Interesting quote from the summary

[DJRumpy]

I think it would be more accurate to say that Apple already has the pole position (no pun intended), and that any new competitors would be the runner up until proven otherwise.

"The first big player that steps up with something competitive to Apple in that regard will have the pole position in 2010's race for the hot re-emergent tablet market."

Re:Interesting quote from the summary

[Space cowboy]

Neither. It's mainly purchased due to a desire to conform to what the majority have, mainly for interoperability with others (work, gamers, ...). It's purchased because it has the majority of marketshare.

It's tough to make the same claim when Apple went from zero phones in 2007 to what they have today, or the introduction of the iPad which again went from 0 to todays 2 million in a matter of weeks.

Simon.

Re:Interesting quote from the summary

[node 3]

That's the best evidence of good marketing I've come across. It's an unproven device which few people had even seen, let alone had the chance to try out, yet preorders and early orders came in by the hundreds of thousands.

In stores, before you buy an iPad, you can try one. Even before the iPad was announced, you would have experience of the OS from the iPhone. And ultimately, you can return it, if it doesn't meet your expectations.

There's absolutely no way whatsoever Apple's current success can have been achieved primarily by marketing. For marketing to work, long-term, you have to have a great product behind it.

People want to conform to a majority brand: the Apple brand offers social interoperability.

Apple had zero smartphones sold just three years ago. Now they have tens of millions. These people all bought iPhones because it was already a majority consumer brand?

No-one does real work on an Apple iDevice - they're for the guy in Starbucks always writing his first bestseller, taken mainstream.

I can guarantee you more "real work" is done on iOS than on Android OS. But it's a silly metric to use, unless you think that people should only own things that are used for "real work", or that the iPad is primarily targeted as a device for "real work".

"Real work" (whatever that means) is still primarily the role of the PC (whether Windows or Mac). The iPad is useful to augment "real work", but isn't something that's yet set to replace the PC for that purpose. Which is why no one every says it should, outside of those that use it as a reason to put it down.

Re:iPhad; hardware is sexy?

[PIPBoy3000]

For the majority of consumers, the biggest thing you can do with a tablet form factor is to drop the price.

Re:iPhad; hardware is sexy?

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Wow, a blatant troll at +3 insightful. Well, I suppose it only takes a handful of mods.

1. There is nothing sexy about a crippled CPU with no connectivity.

There is something intriguing, and perhaps sexy from the right viewpoint, about a device that responds instantly and smoothly to your input, and which has consumer-level (finished) applications that look gorgeous. A device that was nothing but "shiny" would have no, or few, practical applications, and any consumer level app is or can be considered a "practical application"--it's something you would pay money to do, use, or have. Or, well, not any, I guess, but I think the size of the market supposes pretty clearly, if only by sheer virtue of statistics, that there are in fact practical applications for it.

2. People can't handle choices. If you give them a device with only a few buttons, then it's like a microwave and they're happy.

I disagree with your oversimplification. A platform like Windows or Linux allows anyone who develops applications to say, "You need to be this geeky to install and use this application." This is by far one of the most straightforward, and yet it is somehow one of the most hotly debated, reversals of the iOS: they do not allow you to jump through hoops in order to get extra functionality, which means that the programmers either have to begrudgingly improve their GUI skills or limit functionality altogether.

The reason is simple--the people they're marketing to will go cross-eyed if you talk to them about a topic they would need to study for months or years to understand at the same level you would, and believe it or not, computers and programming are such a topic. If your life is already computer-centric, understanding computers is no big deal. If your life is centered around construction work, business deals, hair salons, clothing design, or any of the other (completely fucking legitimate) career paths out there, saying "You have to spend months learning computers before this $500 tablet and this particular $2 application become useful to you" is going to lose you customers.

If instead you tell those same customers, "We promise we won't let the programmers do anything that's going to confuse the crap out of you, for instance, try this $2 app that you can start using right away! And there are more that are just as easy!" you now have a customer, and probably more on the way

I mean, in some ways I feel you. I've been a computer user literally longer than I can remember, and the idea of having a tablet that can also have cron jobs and shell scripts running in the background is delicious. But no, dude, don't yell at the Norms for being Normal. Give it a year or two and there will be some kind of really excellent Linux tablet that does everything a geek could ever want. You don't have to try to turn this one into that miracle product. Just let it be.