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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."
From Wikipedia,
Sounds analogous to the common practice in the book-publishing industry of quoting "100,000 copies shipped" or whatever, which may or may not bear much relationship to how many books have been sold. In fact, some of the strange practices in book retailing, like publishers' willingness to give a credit to bookstores for unsold books without even having them returned, are in part aimed at making it easier to shovel a bunch of books down the distribution channels.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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).
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.
This is regarded as the best Android tablet device as well. Hello HP, you had the number two position in your hands, even YOU sold more than that before the fire sale.
Jonathanjk.com
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.
When MS released the Win Phone 7 they counted the retail sales, the devices setting on retail shelves, the devices in the retail channel, the devices on manufacturer's inventory shelves and, apparently, the devices being made at the time. All to make it appear that the WP7 was enjoying greater success than it actually was.
Of course, we are assuming that Lenovo is telling the truth which, along with ethics, seems to be scarce commodities in business these days.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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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The professionals used Betacam
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.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Unfounded corprate trash talk. How is this news?
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
>It's obviously calling early adopters idiots.
In a way, they are.
They're guaranteed to be getting beta-test products for the highest price anyone will ever pay.
For that, they get something that's a bigger version of the phone they paid too much for a few months before.
And very, very few of them get any sort of compensatory social or business boost from the image bump of having the latest and greatest. The only thing they all get is the tiny endorphin rush of buying something cool.
The mercantile world has conditioned hundreds of thousands of people to keep pushing that button.
...if Apple's injunction against Samsung has anything to do with there supposedly only being 20,000 out of a million units sold?
windows xp
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.
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
Yes, people just "hate" Apple and Microsoft for no valid reasons whatsoever. It's not "hate", it's simply being objective and not a F.F.F. (fruity fucking fanboy).
Right, because "reality" is that the iPad is a flop? Or that it's not the most successful tablet ever? Or that it wasn't the first truly successful tablet?
And how exactly is it that you can claim to be objective when you immediately follow that claim by stating those that disagree with you are "F.F.F. (fruity fucking fanboy)"? If you really had an objective argument, you should be able to defend it without such nonsense.
Does anyone other than Samsung and Lenovo really care?
Speaking as somebody who owns an iPad, I would love to see something like the Tab (which is pretty nice, actually) light a fire under Apple to try even harder.
Let's get some competition going.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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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Android tablet makers don't seen to understand that, with the iPad being used by law enforcement, and hospitals, and all. Nobody needs an Android table that costs just as an iPad.
You'd think there'd have been some really significant discounting in the channels if there were a million sitting in warehouses. There were some brief offers on the original Tab, but there was no fire sale. Presumably Samsung would have an interest in getting them in people's hands rather than simply scrapping them. It would be an expensive - and unimaginative - way to protect brand reputation.
So how does Lenovo guy know much about Samsung sales?
Samsung published its sales figures. They recently (about a month ago) decided to halt that practice, possibly because it was giving their competitors an advantage in the market.
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