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Why the Tablet Market is Really the iPad Market
Hugh Pickens writes writes "James Kendrick writes that after Apple introduced the iPad, companies shifted gears to go after this undiscovered new tablet market but in spite of the number of players in tablets, no company has discovered the magic bullet to knock the iPad off the top of the tablet heap. 'What's happening to the 7-inch tablet market is what happened to the PC market several times. Big name desktop PC OEMs, realizing that consumers didn't care about megahertz and megabytes — yes, that long ago — turned to a price war in order to keep sales buoyant,' writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. 'Price becomes the differentiating factor, and this in turns competition into a race to the bottom.' Historically, when a race to the bottom is dictated by the market, it's more a sign of a lack of a market in general. If enough buyers aren't willing to pay enough for a product to make producers a profit, the market is just not sufficient. Price is a metric that most people know and understand because it's nowhere as ethereal or complicated as CPU power or screen resolution. Given a $199 tablet next to another for $299, the $100 difference in the price tag will catch the eye before anything else. But if price is such an important metric, why is the iPad — with its premium price tag — so popular? Simple, it was the first tablet to go mass market, and cumulative sales of around 85 million gives the iPad credibility in the eye on potential buyers. 'So the problem with the Kindle Fire — and the Nexus 7 — is the same problem that's plagued the PC industry. Deep and extreme price cuts give the makers no wriggle room to innovate,' writes Kingsley-Hughes. 'By driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations.'"
The ipad can't even search within a webpage. I presume Nexus 7 and others can?
Say what? Even my first-gen still-on-iOS 4.3 iPad can search within a webpage, in Safari. Since 2010, apparently.
geek. lawyer.
The ipad can't even search within a webpage.
Wrong. It can, but the way Apple implemented it is obnoxious.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
No tablet comes close to the experience of the iPad; no phone comes close to the effectiveness of the iPhone line. No question-- I'm no fanboy
The former statement appears to contradict the latter. I'm sorry you think your shiny iThing is the be all and end all, but the reality is that Android phones come out of the box with a different (see that word? you may want to learn that word if you want to get rid of your fanboy label) feature set than Apple's offerings. Some of us *gasp* actually weighed up the feature set of both platforms not ever having owned a smartphone and have chosen willingly to go with Android.
It's only taken the iPhone 2 years to catch up partially with the features which sold me on the far better Android platform (yes I'm am now an Android fanboy) with things like a useful notification bar, multitasking, or home screen widgets, and even now what I don't miss is paying 99c for every bloody app no matter how basic.
I'm an iOS music app developer, and for music apps and action games, despite the similar hardware Android just doesn't cut it yet performance-wise. Check out the touch-to-sound latency times below that another music app developer posted last week. For many apps it doesn't matter, but for audio and many types of games, 200ms latency is too much! I haven't tested Android myself, but on iOS I get about 40ms.
WaveSynth for Android 1.0.1
HTC (4.0.3) -> 186ms
Google Nexus 7 (4.1.1 Jellybean) -> 213ms
Galaxy S2 (4.0.3) -> 256ms
WaveSynth 2.1
iPhone 4 (5.1.1) -> 49ms
link
Go look at iFixit's teardown. The nexus has about 1/3 of the battery and runs about as long as an iPad3. The display on the iPad drove up the cost and sucks battery because they pushed it out before the tech was really ready.
And I'd bet profit is being banked on the Nexus at launch. Tablets are insanely overpriced. You can go to Walmart today and pick up a netbook for about $220 with a 10.1 inch display, hard drive, Windows 7 license, all the extra fans and crap to run Intel Inside and a more complicated laptop housing. We were told an SoC built around ARM was simplier, cheaper and needed less power. So why do they cost so much more?
Democrat delenda est
Depending on price, I'd grab an x86 Surface in a second. The ARM version... I'm not sure yet. I really dislike Win8 on desktops, but I think it might be far superior to iOS and Android on tablets. I think (subjective) aesthetics are much nicer than Android or iOS, I like the fact that it (in theory) can interoperate with my desktop, and share apps. I like the fact that it is a full OS, and not a toy OS like Android or iOS.
Obviously this all depends on factors, how is the ecosystem, how is the support, how much does it cost, how Microsofty is Microsoft going to be with it. How popular also plays a role, since it ensures further development, and more apps.
Right now I'm happy with my Transformer, and wouldn't trade it for an iPad, or pretty much anything else. I like the Nexus 7, it looks solid, but its too damn small for my needs. Perhaps I might get one for my girlfriend, though she loves her netbook (easier to do homework on), so probably not. If they made a "full size" one for a bit more, I'd probably grab it when I feel the limitations on my current tablet (hasn't happened yet).
I'm not an MS fan boy, but I'm not frightened to admit that they do somethings right. I can see myself sticking Win8 on my HTPC (not my desktop, ever), and I can see their tablet being brilliant. Hell, I'm one of the few people who really wanted a Zune to replace my aging iPod Classic, but the fact that I had to use WMP, and the that I could find an iPod with much larger capacity cheaper stopped me. Hell, I even liked the brown one, I'm sick of glossy white and silver, or glossy black and silver gadgets, with rounded corners, obviously. That was one thing that made my love my Transformer... Its brown, and looks nothing like an iPad/iPhone/iPod/iWhatever. Apple is fashion that really should die, their devices just don't look very good (to me). The only product design of theirs that I like is the MacMini, the rest are kind of blah and dated looking.
It find it sad that most manufacturers of Android devices have to follow the Apple-look-a-like mold. Do something different, differentiate yourself, make your own goddamn design!
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Transformer Infinity. Absolutely superior to the latest ipad in almost every way for a similar price. The ipad has an extra inch of screen on one side due to having a different aspect ratio, and a little more battery but no more endurance. That's its only advantage
Apple sold 26 million iPhones and 17 million iPads. They sold 8.6 million iPods. Supposedly, the iPod touch is the most popular, so we'll give it 50%, or 4.3 million for a grand total of 47.3 million iOS devices sold. Samsung sold 50 million smartphones, but only about 2.4 million tablets to bump them up to 52.4 million Android devices.
Noobs...
There were 194.913 million handsets shipped in the China market during the first half of 2012, according to statistics published by the China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
Of the shipment volume, 94.855 million or 48.67% were smartphones in 822 models of which 801 models or 97.44% were based on Android. China-based vendors accounted for 75.16% of the half-year shipment volume, and international vendors 24.84%
http://lazure2.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/boosting-the-mediatek-mt6575-success-story-with-the-mt6577-announcement/
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The perception that polymers are somehow inferior dates from the days of polystyrene, which was a very low spec polymer. Now look at advanced racing bicycles, or the control surfaces on F1 cars, or the wings of the Dreamliner. They are made of plastic, rather than aluminum. It certainly isn't to save money. Those carbon fibre/kevlar/polymer resin composites are 100% synthetic plastics.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."