While I can’t claim for sure TiPb was the first to say there wasn’t a tablet market, just an iPad market, we’ve been talking for a long time now about how the iPad has become so dominant, so fast, it’s left very little room in mainstream hearts and wallets for competitors. The latest cases in point:
According to The Guardian, Lenovo director of consumer products, Andrew Barrow, said rival Samsung has only sold some 20,000 for the 1 million Galaxy Tab 7s they’d stuffed into channels last year. Also, due to Apple’s economies of scale and component pricing advantage, trying to undercut them with cheaper tablets “would be giving money away.” Will newer Galaxy Tabs that blur the lines between phones (5.5) and full on tablets (10.1) change anything?
PCMag says Best Buy is cutting $150 off the price tag of the BlackBerry PlayBook 64GB. Again, with iPad starting at $499 and HP’s TouchPad having been on fire sale for $99, it’s tough for small tablets to justify big price tags. Will BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 turn that around, or will RIM have to suck it up and cut costs to gain share?
Lastly, and sadly, while HP will be doing another limited run of TouchPad‘s to keep manufacturing partners happy, they don’t seem to be changing their minds about investing in webOS tablet hardware in the long run. They don’t even seem able to put out the larger capacity, different colored devices they had on the roadmap. And Derek from PreCentral.net so wanted one in white!
Is anyone besides Apple close to getting this right yet? When iPad 3 launches next spring, am I going to have anyone else even trying to tempt me away from it?
[The Guardian, PCMag, HP]
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