When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend
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Apple's Ipad 2 rivals will fail, says analyst firm
THE MAKER OF SHINY TOYS, Apple won't face any challengers to its Ipad 2 during 2011 if analyst outfit Forrester is to be believed.
Nevermind that Motorola, Toshiba, Samsung, Research in Motion (RIM), HTC, Viewsonic, HP, LG and Acer have already shown off new tablets, Forrester thinks, "Competing tablets to the iPad are poised to fail" and forecasted that Apple will enjoy an 80 per cent market share by the end of 2011.
That's a rather impressive statement given that rival outfit Strategy Analytics claims that Android devices already make up 22 per cent of the market. Apparently Forrester believes that Apple's unimpeded run to tablet glory is due to consumers placing higher value on Apple products and customer care.
Sarah Rotman, senior analyst at Forrester also said there was a human element favouring Apple. "The humans working in the Apple Store will have a huge impact teaching consumers about the iPad and how to use it." Humans working in a store? It seems Apple has tapped into an unknown resource, the village elders must be informed at once.
Rotman continued by saying that those who work at Verizon and Best Buy stores don't know how to flog tablets, whereas Apple has the customer dancing to its tune right from the get-go. Rotman is right in that sense, perhaps. Apple's retail experience is certainly better than wandering around a branch of PC World or Best Buy being courted by a salesperson who is more enthusiastic about selling an extended warranty than the features of products on the shelves.
However Rotman wasn't writing off all of Apple's competitors. The shining beacon of light reflecting from her Ipad comes from Amazon, as she has detected a "market that's ripe for disruption" by the mail-order firm. Confused? Here's Forrester's three-point plan for Amazon to take on Apple.
1. Launch its own e-book service after Apple managed to anger so many with its payment rules. This is probably Amazon's best chance at one-upping Apple as its recent payment fiasco left many up in arms.
2. Copy the Gillette sales model. Flog the tablet at below cost and overcharge for content. Such a scheme has worked wonders for the popularity of file sharing networks on the Internet.
3. Use its brand, retail channel and the content. According to Forrester's figures more people want to buy a tablet from Amazon than Motorola.
It's not all that surprising consumers rate Motorola so poorly, given that for the past five years Motorola has shown off only three devices worthy of note, the Milestone, Atrix and Xoom. Forrester doesn't provide any figures for comparison against brands such as Samsung, LG, HP or RIM.
Amazon does have an impressive supply chain, but so do firms such as HP and Acer. Unlike with books, users like to play around with tablets before buying them, so a lack of brick and mortar stores could hinder Amazon in selling tablet PCs. It also seems that Rotman is using the argument that Amazon's considerable success with the Kindle will automatically translate to the much more technologically complicated tablet PC market.
Perhaps realising that putting all her eggs in Amazon's basket could leave Rotman with egg on her face, she says a more detailed report outlines ways in which Sony, Microsoft and Vizio, a US consumer electronics outfit, can also 'disrupt' the market. It would be an easy recommendation to make if Sony and Microsoft had set the smartphone market ablaze recently, but The INQUIRER isn't buying it.
While some of Rotman's points seem a little iffy, she is still on the right track with urging tablet manufacturers to create low-cost devices. US bookseller Barnes and Noble has been pushing its Nook reader, which is in essence a cheap Android tablet with an e-reader application. It is available only in the US, but Barnes and Noble has said that it has sold millions of devices.
The problem is, as Rotman has pointed out, that tablet PCs such as Motorola's Xoom are priced too closely to Apple's Ipad 2. For a lot of people who find it hard to look beyond the branding, there simply isn't enough of a price difference to consider something other than Apple's iconic products.
Even so, it is hard to see how Apple will hold on to a 93 per cent market share with the onslaught of Android tablets in 2011. Apple might still remain the number one vendor, but just as in the smartphone market, Steve Jobs won't be able to stem the tide of the Android tablets. µ
Tags: Apple
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@Infernoz - so you bought a tablet that pretty much HAS to be rooted to make it half decent (no Android marketplace to start with, V2.2 with 2.3 promised at some undetermined point - so no proper tablet support, certainly no USB host support out of the box), that HAS to have a 3rd party SDHC card (a cheap and nasty class 4 doesn't match the iPad's flash for speed BTW, try a class 10) as it ships with 512MB of internal flash and a 4GB SDHC card, that has a cheap screen that isn't good off angle (particularly in portrait mode) and collects fingerprints worse than the iPad. Add to that 2/3rds of the playback battery life and 1/7th of the standby life, more weight and bulk, no 3G or GPS options and you can pretty much see that you got what you paid for.
If you're happy with it then fair enough, but don't try to pretend that the iPad doesn't have advantages of it's own, particularly to the buying public who mostly want things to work straight out of the box.
This seems like Apple fan-boy backside talk. You always pay a heavy price, including various losses of freedom, for buying the insincere Apple brand.
I have a sensibly priced, standard root enabled, Android 2.2 Tablet (Advent Vega), which poos on the ipad for price; it has proper flash, HDMI, and USB host/slave, and can download files, unlike the ipad; all at a fraction of the cost. 16GB Class 4 micro SDHC only costs £16 (via Amazon), so any talk about built-in memory size is frankly irrelevant.
As for the ridiculously over-priced big brand Android tablets, that is their loss, and just shows that they are even more stupid and greedy than Apple are; the Dixons group must be loving this.
So, lesbian apple haters do exist then!
I think, love, the word for which you were looking is PREPOSTEROUS, which, basically, sums up your rather crass comment.
If you can't see the point in a tablet then here's a tip - don't buy one. If you can see the point then the competition currently falls into three categories - (1) cheap and nasty, your $99 specials that have woeful battery life and performance, (2) 7" models (1/2 the size due to the fact that they measure screen diagonal) that lack proper OS and have limited app support while not being much cheaper than the iPad, and (3) 10" models that have an incomplete OS and even more limited app support (plus they cost more than all but the most expensive iPad model).
It's not wildly surprising that analysts think that the current competition isn't up to taking major volume off of Apple. What IS surprising is the number of different uses that people are thinking up for them. Businesses in particular are coming up with new applications (everything from cockpit charts and manuals for pilots to insurance broking systems that save brokers from dragging suitcases full of documents around with them). If the device looks good then so much the better.
As for the "woman" commenter above, the stats show that the iPad is approaching gender neutrality, i.e. nearly 1/2 of it's users are female. There may be some who use it as a status symbol, but many see its utility. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like someone who shuns others based in what they do or don't own.
"and having the manufacturers able to delete anything they don't like from it"
Google is able to do that with Android too, they're doing it with the software that's been installing malware on Android phones.
Maybe Apple products are a bit of a status symbol, but no more so than Android devices are a 'stance against apple' for some people
I've yet to see a website (other than myspace which I use for my friends music) that I can't view without flash.
That's not to say I don't want it, but I can certainly do without it
Also, how is it over-priced? Samsung had to admit they need to go back to the drawing board because they were going to charge more for the 10" Galaxy Tab. Yes, it's not cheap but I wouldn't say it's over-priced
Be reasonable and stop being such a "android fangirl" - oh yes, I went there ;)
clearly Forrester is NOT to be believed and are obviously an inept company lacking any credibility or professional integrity and are in the pay of Apple (who seem to get more 3rd Riech with each passing year).
Mr Latif (the author of this ridiculously ill-informed article) is clearly nieve and/or a close mided fanboi who should be fired.
Why would anyone with a brain buy any over-priced tablet with no standard usb's or flash, especially if it means limited compatibility with other brands equipment, and having the manufacturers able to delete anything they don't like from it - purposterous !
I see Apple products as a status symbol - a symbol of someone who has low self esteem, little common sense, and who actually believes that by owning an overpriced product will somehow add to their credibility - I would feel sorry for them but they're usually complacently smug while being equally ill informed so i can have no pity for them
a common knowlage among savvy women is 'if he owns an apple, just say NO'
I can't agree with this, til now Job's has been playing a dangerous move, but soon it can turn against him. He thinks he tells flash sucks, and people will leave flash, because of his interests on apps business, but he forgets that in Europe, Apple's major market is still the marketing and design professionals, who know flash is the only support to deliver truly multimedia support for web (html5 is still limited and 85% of top hundred websites use flash to an extended degree, and have no intention of switching) and Adobe isn't a small company he can pick on it, this is a battle he can't win, and android is already gaining a major market, being flash one of their wild cards (in comparative articles, flash support is the turning point for android based devices).I'm a designer, I've always preferred mac's on pc's, but I won't get a Ipad or an Iphone if I can get a android device and see my work and other work with flash content.
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For your consideration, The Inquirer guide to spelling:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1002967/inquir
Short quotes for those without long enough attention spans (the average Apple fanboy?)
"We take a simple view on spelling - we try to get it right, regardless of what overpaid cokeheads in marketing departments believe."
"These names are names. Proper nouns. All that mid-word capital-letter guff is all marketing. And we don't do marketing here."
What's an iPad?
Your story would have more credibility if you learned how to spell iPad.
This is completely bogus. Apple's "Customer Service" consists of artfully dodging relevant technical questions and managing to deny any help whatsoever for incidents of eminently defective design problems. I have an iPhone whose front glass shattered while 80+ minutes into an important call and I have a MacBook Pro with an exploding battery that not only destroyed the computer's case but burned my leg whilst self-destructing. I used to love Apple back from the original Apple II+ days. Jobs has shown his true face as an artful mass-scammer. Dear Leader has many more tricks up his sleeve but the iPad 2 is not one of them.