On Mar 3, 7:06 pm, Casper Bang <[email protected]> wrote: > I see no reason for why Android tablets wouldn't be able to compete, > when you look at what happened in the smartphone segment.
I can see three reasons: 1. Smartphones are (in the U.S. and Europe) sold subsidized by carriers with multi-year contracts where the carriers pick which phone models they push through subsidies and promotions. iPods (and other music players) are bought by consumers at retail stores, based on the vendors brand and their perceived values. That's why in the U.S., Android outsells the iPhone on one hand - more carriers, carriers like Android more - whereas the iPods outsell all other music players combined. Though you can buy a tablet both subsidized and with a contract through carriers and or unsubsidized at retail, I think (without stats to back this up) for now most tablets are bought at retail (most users already have a mobile phone contract and prefer not to get another one). And there Apple has a stronger presence than their current competitor - the Xoom is only at Verizon right now, whereas the iPad is at both Verizon and AT&T, at the Apple stores and at Best Buy, Walmart and Target. 2. As Steve Jobs predicted, the iPad competitors do have a hard time matching the iPad's price (at comparable specs). The Galaxy Tab was as expensive as the iPad - though it only had half the screen area. The Xoom WiFi is supposed to be $100 more than the base-level iPad when it gets released (who at Motorola greenlighted the 3G version first?). Apple has a huge buying power (they supposedly buy 40% of the world's Flash chip production) and is smart about their BOM (the use the same CPU/graphic chip in the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Apple TV). I hope Android (or HP) will get more competitive - I want the iPad to be cheaper, too. :-) 3. The iPad has the most content (iTunes, iBooks) and decent software for buying and managing it and the iOS devices (iTunes). Sure, you can buy / get content from different places on Android - apps, music, podcasts, audio books, videos - but they weren't designed to go together and are sometimes only available in some countries (Netflix / Amazon video: U.S. only). Now Google is rumored to open a music and video store soo, but it'll be a while before they roll it out globally - Europe is a beast when it comes to music and video rights. And I'm sure eventually all content will be in cloud, but with the slow upload rates as most users have have them today (1 MBit/s or less) and download caps on data contracts, local storage of content on your PC / your device will be with us for quite a while, so you need some desktop software to manage it - which is either third-party or handset manufacturer specific on Android. So what will happen to your content when you switch to a different Android phone? Maybe you have to re- import it, maybe your playlists and your ratings will disappear. With Apple, you know that you'll be able to manage your content and your iOS devices in iTunes. And yes, iTunes is only an ok application on OS X and a bad one in Windows. But at least you don't have to put your USB port into Debug Mode to transfer data, like you have to with the Galaxy S on the Mac (http://blog.mfabrik.com/2010/09/04/samsung-galaxy- s-i9000-and-android-2-1-enable-file-copy-over-usb-as-mass-storage-mode- on-osx-and-linux/). Predictions are always hard, especially when they concern the future. However, based on these facts, I think that the iPad market share in the U.S. a couple of years out will be in-between the current smartphone one (25-30%) and the iPod one (70%), at 40-50%. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
