[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Unlike Apple Samsung is trying to address the needs of everyone in the market (e.g. tablets in sizes of 7.0/7.7/8.9/10.1"). They are pushing the envelope with a 5.3" phone with Wacom (which is a raging success in Asia). And in the end, that is why I think Samsung will, sooner or later, overtake Apple. One size does not fit all, neither for phones nor for tablets. Now they are the ones taking bold steps with new designs (flexible displays coming up) and they make a lot of the components themselves.

Samsung may overtake Apple in the tablet field. But right now they are doing a horrible, horrible job of it. They've produced a lot of tablets in a lot of form factors...but have only managed to get about 7% of the market, despite flooding it with products. (Their product manager admitted as much at MWC (although he didn't say "horrible"). The Galaxy Tab 10.1 - which is probably closest to the iPad 2 in performance - is much more expensive than the iPad unless you buy it with a two year contract. A really stupid move on Samsung's part...unless they can't match Apple's low prices (which is probably the case, as weird as it is to write that).

I think it's significant that the second most popular tablet - the Kindle Fire - doesn't compete with Apple on specs at all, but is sold basically as a way of accessing Amazon's ecosystem. While making little (if anything) on sales of the tablets themselves. This appears to be a successful strategy - and I think it's notable that Amazon isn't offering all possible tablets to all possible users; they settled on a tablet that is just under half the size of the iPad to fill the "pocketable" niche.

This is a strategy that Samsung can't emulate because Samsung doesn't have an ecosystem like Amazon (or Apple, for that matter). The ecosystem for Samsung is owned by Google, so any apps or music or movies bought for Samsung products go to Google or the dev/artist. Meaning that Samsung has to make its money on the sale of the product itself, even as Apple itself is beefing up its own ecosystem and tying together its phone, TV device, tablets, and computers (and PCs, for that matter) through iCloud.

Time will tell, Apple is in a great position now. Remember when the iPad 2 came out an the competition was scrambling to adjust their designs? Now tablets already announced and arriving shortly are even ahead of the iPad 3 in many ways.

Which tablets? Ahead in what what way? Shipping when? The Asus transformer Infinity doesn't have a ship date, doesn't have a price, has a screen that is inferior to the screen on the iPad 3, and ships with a CPU/GPU that is either worse than what the iPad *2* has (the Tegra 3 model) or is about the same as what the iPad *2* has (the Snapdragon model). And this is a product that has only been announced - neither the price or the availablity has been determined yet.

Right now, the iPad is clearly leading the pack. Whether this will be the case in 3 or 5 years is an open question. But it's not one now.

(The battery issue is interesting, too - the Infinity ships with a 25 WH battery; the iPad 3 with a 42.5 WH battery. There has been some interesting discussion on this, and I wonder how it will play out in the real world.

And they will upgrade again in 6 months, while Apple will take another 18 months. Things have changed, Apple will have to do more than just incremental upgrades every 12-18 months.

From the point of view of sales, upgrading too frequently is bad, not good, as it tends to cause customers to be reluctant to buy because they are afraid that their product will be outdated too soon. That's why there is a lot of Android discussion on trying to move to yearly updates.

Apple fills the needs of many very well, but we are discussing long term market leadership here. They are far from number one in the PC and phone business, still many of you are very happy with Apple. That is great. But you can't stay number one for ever with just one device, and a software and eco system that caters just to a specific part of the market.

Well, it depends on the specific part of the market. The iPod did quite well catering to 80% of the market with yearly incremental updates.

But the consumer tablet market is only two years old, so it's hard to know how it will develop. But I think that companies like Samsung or even Asus (who I think make the best non-Apple tablets) won't succeed if they try to compete by copying the iPad's approach because they are too far behind, too unfocused, and don't have any meaningful ecosystem to offer. Offering something that is like an ipad, but in 5", 7", 7.7", 8.9", and 10.1" isn't a great approach. Companies that will succeed will attack from a slightly different angle - like Amazon, offering a cheap tablet in a smaller form factor with a focus on Amazon content. And possibly like MS, who I assume are going to focus on the business use cases of tablets (which is very interesting to me, since we use iPads at work quite a bit).