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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.'"
How can Android look like a cheap copy of the iOS experience when Android is infinitely more customizable and feature-filled than iProducts?
Oh, I don't know... Little things like the friggin' Android Market not working on 2.x era devices with large displays (1024 vertical) without rotating the device to landscape and back again, because until the screen filled up with options (which would never happen in portrait mode), you couldn't flip to the next 'page' of results... Little fit-and-finish things like that let you know Google didn't pump nearly as much time and effort into QA as Apple did.
The iOS experience is unflaggingly smooth and responsive, and the apps, as a general rule, look better (higher level of "fit and finish"). For instance, compare GoodReader with ezPDF or anything else in the Android ecosystem...
Let's not beat around the bush here. iOS offers a very watered-down featureset so non-tech saavy people don't have trouble with it. That's fine for people like you, but I wouldn't ever call Android a copy of iOS in any way when Android simply does more than iOS does.
Filesystems. I hate the way iOS blocks applications from accessing each other's files (it's up to each app developer to 'announce' (via the API) what files it can accept, and equally up to the other apps to support the 'Open in...' functionality), but, I get it. Android, I hate the way files are scattered everywhere, with no rhyme or reason (I know there are (now?) guidelines, but they're not enforced, and often when apps *cough*dropbox*cough* try to be(come) 'good citizens,' it breaks functionality others relied on). I have some apps that refuse to see the non-standard SD card mount point on the rooted PRS-T1 (/extsd instead of /sdcard, which Sony inexplicably uses to refer to a portion of the built-in flash), or to see any files not on an SD card even if the device has gigabytes of built-in storage...
Six of one, half-dozen of the other. iOS is like a gated community, Android is more like Bartertown. Both can be a PITA to deal with, for different reasons. But since I'm using a tablet to actually Get Things Done, I'd rather have the smooth, predictable, curated experience of an iOS device than the essentially lawless "hope this is gonna work!" chaos of the current Android ecosystem.
But just because the Android stack is more 'open' doesn't mean it's more 'innovative,' so my original question stands. In what way(s) can Android be described as 'innovative'?
geek. lawyer.
Us Linux folks have been waiting 10 years for this. The day that Microsoft started eating the OEM's lunch. At some point they will have to compete against Microsoft. Since Microsoft gets Windows for "free" the only way to match the price point on the hardware will be to load an OS that costs them less than Windows.
With the Windows 8 App store it looks like Valve has figured out they had better have an exit strategy for leaving the Windows PC Market. Hopefully the OEMs like Dell, HP and Lenovo will figure this out soon as well.
vi +
Yep, we've been loading Novo 7 Tornados with manuals, training PDFs, OHS links, etc and handing them out to trainees and customers.
At $75 each, they're cheaper than printed manuals and far more likely to be carried and used. The have 1GHz processors, 1GB RAM, 8GB storage, and Android 4.03...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Ok, I really don't like advocation for apple inc but:
Is the nexus7 a shell of glass and aluminium? No. That is one of the problems I have had with
Android tablets. They are too plasticky, usually after a few weeks use they look far worse than
they begun with and from day one you get a hint of a device made to accounts, not to specs.
The apple device is perceived as a better device because in every perceptional level it is a
better device; not because it was there first.
-- no sig today