An editorial on iPad sales and competition

[RockdaMan]

Easy, says this mobile technology writer:

It’s not like products such as Honeycomb tablets or the webOS-based TouchPad aren’t acceptable to the market. They may not match the iPad in every area but by and large they are mostly functionally equivalent.

The only way for any tablet maker to hit big sales is to break through the mainstream consumer market. Not the techies who follow the world of tablets looking for the Next Big Thing, but the regular folks who rarely buy technology items. These millions of folks are the ones who snatch up the iPad but aren’t grabbing the competing products in Best Buy or other retailers. The iPod crowd, in other words.

The sad part of this whole tablet debacle is that many of the products not selling are quite good. They are no iPad, as we are all fond of saying, but they are decent products that would serve the market just fine. That market will never end up getting near them, unfortunately, and will certainly never be shown why they should buy one.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-new...yre-ipads/3782

[RockdaMan]

http://twitter.com/#!/jkendrick/stat...73169780539392

[carld]

If Amazon does a good job with their supposed tablet I don't think they'll have any problem selling tons of them.

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by carld

If Amazon does a good job with their supposed tablet I don't think they'll have any problem selling tons of them.

Excellent point!

That actually follows the authors premise of selling them, not to techies and computer users, but to an already built market (in this case, the e-reader market) that trusts your brand.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by carld

If Amazon does a good job with their supposed tablet I don't think they'll have any problem selling tons of them.

Indeed, Amazon is in a great position to do well, because they won't be selling just another tablet, they will be selling the Amazon experience, and consumers by and large already love the Amazon experience.

[SCION]

Originally Posted by kjk

Indeed, Amazon is in a great position to do well, because they won't be selling just another tablet, they will be selling the Amazon experience, and consumers by and large already love the Amazon experience.

Myself included. I'm ready to give them my money for an eink device and tablet. I wholeheartedly tried the NOOK (Barnes and Noble) thing.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

It won't matter who's got a tablet to sell, or how good it is, if they don't market it. In order to compete with the iPad, it will have to become as well-known as the iPad to the average consumer. Otherwise, it'll remain a geek toy (Zune, anyone?).

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

It won't matter who's got a tablet to sell, or how good it is, if they don't market it. In order to compete with the iPad, it will have to become as well-known as the iPad to the average consumer. Otherwise, it'll remain a geek toy (Zune, anyone?).

...and the Galaxy Tab and the Xoom...etc.

From the article:

Physical retailers are even worse for non-iPads than the abysmal mixed online experience. Go in any Best Buy or other big box retailer that carries tablets and there’s no telling what you’ll find. Maybe there will be a counter with tablets scattered all over. Maybe some of them will actually work. The only consistent part of the retail buying experience for tablets is that the sales reps don’t know much about any of the products, much less help you decide which one is right for you. They don’t care, frankly, and that message gets through loud and clear.

Everyone thought the Apple retail stores would be the final fatal hubristic cough of a dying company. Equal to the devices perhaps, they have turned out to be Jobs and Co. crowning achievements.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

Easy, says this mobile technology writer

So he never read this:

Apple, which owned more than 94% of the market in the second quarter last year, saw the iPad’s share slide to 61.3% according to Strategy Analytics. Over the same period of time, Android tablets jumped from a 2.9% share to a 30% share last quarter.

My guess is that he doesn't see other tablets being sold because he got stuck playing with the shiny toys in the iThings shop.

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

So he never read this:


My guess is that he doesn't see other tablets being sold because he got stuck playing with the shiny toys in the iThings shop.

It's easy to be snarky on the Internet. Truth is, those numbers don't say what you think they say.

[Graham]

Those figures refer to the number of Android tablets shipped to resellers, not tablets sold. They were widely commented on as being misleading. While the Android share certainly is growing, I think the current figure for sales is estimated to be between 15% and 20% of the market. I also suspect that that is based on activations of Honeycomb as not all the individual manufacturers quote sales numbers.

So Android is definitely growing, but the article may be valid. We'll see whether the rise continues. I suspect that it will, because in the same way there was a path to follow from iPod to iPad, so there should be a draw to move from Android phone to Android tablet. But the article's points about marketing and the overall ecosystem and buying experience are powerful ones.

Graham

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

It's easy to be snarky on the Internet. Truth is, those numbers don't say what you think they say.

Would you be so kind to elaborate? What is the meaning of these numbers?

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Ankh

Would you be so kind to elaborate what do those numbers say?

It's Apple math and understanding only arises from within a black hole

[nesler]

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

Excellent point!

That actually follows the authors premise of selling them, not to techies and computer users, but to an already built market (in this case, the e-reader market) that trusts your brand.

They're not just marketing the tablets to the relatively small subsection of their customer base that has an interest in e-readers. It's not the e-reader market, they're appealing to, but rather the Amazon market as a whole.

Why do you think they made the big move with their app store, and the Netflix-type offerings? They have a massive warehouse of digital media (movies, tv, applications, books) that dwarfs what Apple has, and this is their big push, to make all of that available via one device.

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by Graham

While the Android share certainly is growing, I think the current figure for sales is estimated to be between 15% and 20% of the market.

And that's only if we talk about hardware that has a common OS. When you look at the hardware models being sold, they pale in comparison to iPad sales.

“De-featured, low-cost media tablets are being introduced by more than 50 vendors in 2011,” Orr said. “This will certainly help bolster year-over-year growth for the category

http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/12/an...-market-share/

Given that the latest numbers from Google say that Honeycomb is still less than 1% of the Android OS distribution, obviously the majority of Android tablets in the market are running what is really the phone version of the OS.

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Andro...market_id20526