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Cisco To Challenge iPad With Cius 'Business Tablet'
GMGruman and several other readers noted Cisco's announcement of the forthcoming 7-inch Android-based iPad challenger, the Cius, which "... will offer multiple networking capabilities, keyboard and mouse support, and the ability to do videoconferencing. Cisco says it will cost less than $1,000, or about the same as an iPad. The Cius will come with a front-facing high-definition video camera that can record 720p video at 30 frames per second and a 5-megapixel camera at the back that can capture high-quality video and still images. Users will be able to engage in live video calls [most likely via WebEx] when the tablet is docked or being held. Some units will be available this fall, though general availability is not expected until early 2011."
"Under $1k' (read $999) is what everyone thought the iPad would sell for.
But actually it's half that much, $500 for the base model (which I have and is fine).
It is interesting though they seem to be aiming this at video conferencing users, it could be a lot easier to set up and use than existing solutions.
Until the iPad 2 with Facetime comes out that is... 2011 seems like Cisco is cutting it close.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is completely bizarre. Cisco doesn't have a history of making consumer grade products. And they decide to dive in with an Android tablet? WTF?
They could probably duplicate the hardware, but I doubt Cisco could make anything like iOS.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I would bet everything I could turn to cash that this will fail. As in: Will have the same or less impact on the iPad as mp3 players had on the iPod during the last 10 years.
That's some confident gambling, but I'll put the contents of my billfold on this getting scrapped before it ships. A thousand-dollar video-conferenceing device? Get two netbooks and a coupla six-packs; a much better video-conferencing experience for less!
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Unless Citrix has some real aces up their sleeve, this one is exactly as dead in the water as Apple feels like making it, outside of a few big corporations where just repeating "Cisco, cisco, cisco" in a soothing voice makes management's eye's glaze over and fills them with an irresistable urge to sign purchase orders.
The iPad is a relatively mass-market consumer product, based on a weedy little ARM core(very closely shared with another mass-market consumer product they produce). No way will Cisco be beating them on price, unless they are willing to get hammered on margins. Further, it is a general-purpose computer, crippled only as much as Apple wants it to be(for instance, this Cisco thing supports a mouse and keyboard for doing remote desktop/virtual terminal stuff. If Apple felt threatened, they could have deals inked with Citrix and VMware for their thin-client computing protocols, plus RDP and X11 and maybe NX, all rolled up into an app inside a month(App slogan: "Tenfootpole: for when you need to work on a PC; but can't bear to touch one...). I'm guessing that support for bluetooth mice could be added to the present support for bluetooth keyboards in even less time, and made available privately to that app, so as not to slum up the "touch experience". If they were really feeling motivated, they could kick out a full desktop dock accessory(the camera connect kit shows that there is USB host support in there, so it would take about ten minutes to design a dock with a power brick and USB hub, that holds it at the right angle and lets you plug in your mouse, keyboard, and flash drive full of boring work.
Now, there is no evidence that Apple is thus motivated. If they don't find the corporate market interesting or sufficiently profitable, they just won't bother. Even so, announcing that you plan to release a product when your competitor already has a product that is one software update away from being cheaper and better than that product, seems like a rather dubious move. I certainly wouldn't want to be in Cisco's shoes here.
Really, I was just thinking the opposite: it seems they've done a nice job choosing a different market segment to differentiate them, so they are not competing directly against the iPad. This is essentially what Apple did with the iPhone, they didn't go after business users like Blackberry was doing at the time.
Furthermore, they've already made a fairly large entrance into the teleconferencing market, so this is really just an extension of what they are already doing. If anyone could pull this off, I'd say it would be Cisco. At this point I'd give them an edge over Apple (in this market segment), but that could change if the device is released and it turns out to be a kludge.
Qxe4
If any of these companies learned anything at all from Apple, they wouldn't be announcing tablets to ship next year. They'd be announcing finished products that will be out this month. You can't build a product and aim at a moving target.
HP Slate with Windows 7? Dead, and HP bought Palm to recover. Lenovo Ideapad? Announced at CES, still not out, supposedly a new OS is coming. Cisco Cius? Looks cool, not out until next year.
iPad? Over 3 million of them shipped so far, they were in users' hands 10 weeks after they were announced, and by the time most of these competitors ship (if they do at all), Apple will have a second release of the shipping OS and may well have a second generation of the hardware out as well.
The only thing Apple's preannounced several months ahead of time in recent years was the original iPhone. For a reason - that froze the smartphone market for almost six months until the first one shipped.
Word to future iPad wannabes: Tell us about it when you're ready to ship. You're not going to freeze the market by announcing 6 months early. People aren't going to say "screw Apple, let's wait for the Cius to make tablets legitimate". You'll only look stupid when you don't ship the same product you announced 6 months ago.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
What if they load this sucker up with a special USB-to-RS232 for consoling, and a bunch of Cisco-made apps for plugging into CiscoWorks and other utilities network monitoring, remote management, VPN, and have it support similar 3G data networking?
If they toss one in with every order over $50k of network hardware, I think you'd be seeing these become standard Cisco enterprise management tools. All it has to do is interface with the other stuff Cisco sells, and it completely eliminates my need to haul a 15" laptop around for a console and network access.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Cius> enable t
...
Password:
Cius# conf t
Cius(configure)# addressbook
Cius(configure-addressbook)# phone bob 222-4343
^Z
Cius>dial bob
Cius>no dial bob
This is not an iPad killer. It's not meant to be one. I'm at Cisco Live right now and all the Cisco geeks are wetting themselves over it...but it's not even a competitor to the iPad. It's a niche product to work with Cisco's other technologies. Hospitals are going nuts over the iPad and Cisco wants a play in that market. They want these customers to buy the Cius just like they do Cisco wireless handsets now. Look at the promo pics, it's docked in a Cisco phone.
Different markets.
Depending on what they're using the room for and how many people are expected to be in it, 500k doesn't seem to be all that ludicrous. VC setups aren't exactly cheap, and if you want to be able to connect to multiple locations without an external bridge, encrypt the content, have enough cameras, microphones and screens to cover the room properly, have more than one person participate in the meeting, and generally have anything that is even remotely like having a meeting with everyone being in the same room, it's even more expensive.
Just because you can spend a couple of grand and stick a camera on top of your television set and make someone feel like they're not being totally excluded from the meeting doesn't mean it's a functional solution.