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Lenovo Claims Samsung Galaxy Tab Sold Just 20,000
An anonymous reader writes "Andrew Barrow, director of consumer products for Lenovo Western Europe, claims that the original Galaxy Tab only sold 20,000 out of one million shipped. He goes on to say Samsung was 'channel stuffing' in order to generate publicity and become known as a major Android tablet manufacturer."
Anyone considering making applications for tablets might be interested in how many tablets of a given type have made it into the hands of consumers (e.g. people who might buy there apps).
Google probably has their hands in it too. Galaxy Tab is the only widely known Android tablet and they need to push the idea that someone is actually using Android in tablets. They are a marketing company after all, so they play tricks. This says more about Google and Android than about Samsung, actually.
You can't be as or almost as expensive as the real thing (iPad) and *not* be the real thing. If they would sell the device at $200, it might have a chance. But for anywhere close to the price of an iPad, everybody is just going to buy the iPad, which is far more polished and comes with many more real tablet apps (not ported phone apps) and the app store.
If people can get more quality for the same price, they generally will. This is why Apple sells every single iPad it can produce, and knockoff products don't sell. Why by the knockoff when the real thing is around the same price?
Are you seriously suggesting Apple was first to release a tablet device with a touch screen?
Name the prior ones. Describe them. Were they decent multi-touch? Touch at all or just stylus? What kind of processor? What OS? What resolution & color depth screen? How thick? How heavy? Battery life? What was the price? How many apps were available?
Uh-huh, I thought so.
Yes, this is still an Apple product, but I still have a Newton MessagePad. The Newton platform was released in the mid-80's and was somewhat of a failed experiment. I ain't no Apple fanboy, but I still think of the Newton as revolutionary, and some of the concepts used in its OS would make sense to take a look at these days, such as the handwriting recognition. But also, back in the 'early days' Microsoft did have a tablet device, that failed due to a combination of poor support and hardware limitations, similar to the Newton's demise. I see the success of the iPad as simply the first point in history where the hardware is powerful enough to compensate for poor development and code; couple this with better understanding of the hardware and better coding, and you have a device that finally works more than it fails. So what that there's no current true competitors? It's just a matter of time, we're just at the point where this technology is starting to really take off after a couple of previous aborted attempts. If the market requests tablet computing as the next 'big thing', we'll see more than just the Apple devices soon enough.
Success, if defined by meeting your sales goals, would have to go to Fujitsu. They've been making tablets for decades now. Most of them run Windows (either CE or X86), resistive touch or custom stylus.
They aren't sexy, but every 7-11 in the country (world?) has at least one for inventory control. People use them for work, not watching movies, so I guess they don't count.
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I find Lenovos numbers quite suspect. When the Toichpad only sold 1/10 as many shipped units, Best Buy went apoplectic and demanded to ship them all back but, you are trying to tell me that when Samsung does the same, Best Buy is all cool about it and not a peep? So, where are the galaxy tabs? Sitting in best Buy's warehouse? Yeah. Sure.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Consumer goods are a niche product.
Ever buy anything from Agilent?
No?
They sell a $7 billion a year in "niche" products.
Lots of consumer companies would love that sort of revenue.
In contrast to their past history, Apple is not selling at a much higher margin over manufacturing costs (or they have lower costs) vs generic competitors.
This makes it very, very difficult to displace an iPad.
This is brilliantly done by Apple and a real problem for Android tablets: who is making any money ? Google is making a bit of money from the ads in the Google apps and the Android market, meanwhile the hardware vendors because of Apple's sharp margin on the iPad and because they don't control their platform are making nothing. It's a repeat of the PC market with Google playing Microsofts' role, only without the golden decade during the boom years. Amazon seems to be the only one who gets it: cut the tablet down as much as possible to make it cheaper, market to your existing customer base, create your own ecosystem with store etc. and tell Google "so long and thanks for all the fish." They'll be the first ones making serious money of off an Android tablet.
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And that's where the epic fail resided before Apple came out with the iPad! An OS wholly unsuited for a tablet device! Only the tight integration of OS and hardware that Apple provided is what made a tablet computer a useful! Yes, not for all the same things as a laptop, but, partially the same things and some other things for which a laptop is not ideally suited, such as reading or watching video on a plane. I love my MacBook Pro, especially with MacPorts giving me a lot of the unix-y command-line tools that I love, but I would never use it or even a much smaller laptop (mine is 17") to replace my iPad for my lengthy bus rides or even on my plane rides. And yes, for me it is primarily a media consumption device and fantastic web browser. (I know, no Flash, and good riddance to it, too!) But, so what? The right thing for the right job is what I say. It may not work for you and I don't see it replacing my laptop for a long time, or even ever, but I get about 2 hours of solid use out of it every week day and for non-geeks, I am a programmer, it may well work as the only device they need. Especially when paired with a bluetooth keyboard.
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Sure, but that wasn't your question. Apple didn't invent tablets, they just figured out how to sell them to consumers outside of the niche markets that other manufacturers occupied.
Even on the OS front they basically put the iPhone OS on a bigger screen, and they were not the first to try it. The Nokia 770 pre-dates the iPad by years and runs an OS designed for phones. While Apple can claim that the iPhone was a real game changer (and kudos to them for it) the iPad was really just the next logical step on a well trodden path.
For example Apple had to wait for a low-power high-performance CPU like everyone else. Battery life is one of the killer features you list, but you can't really attribute that to Apple because it was the development of CPUs, LCDs and batteries by other companies that made it happen.
In fact the touch interface of the iPad is quite badly designed in some ways. For example the keyboard is way too large to type on comfortably like the iPhone one. Apple do seem to have a nack for doing good UIs, but like every other company they are not infallible.
So well done for seeing the gap in the market, but that other stuff...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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