Can anyone beat Apple’s iPad lead?
There will be tablets galore on the market just in time for the holidays, but can any of them catch up to the huge lead that Apple has built up while everyone else was trying to get tablets ready for sale?
The whole iPad vs. Nobody experience has been a little surreal. It is as if Henry Ford brought out the first automobile (he didn’t, but this is an analogy, all right?) and no one bothered, for years afterward, to design and build a car to compete with Ford. That is not that far off, given the constantly accelerating speed of innovation in technology. Six months is a long time in the world of computers and electronic gadgets, and that has been how long the iPad has been waiting for a serious competitor. So far, those which have been introduced have been relegated to the status of lackluster clones. So right now the iPad is the winner of the tablet race by default.
What will happen, though, when real competition comes on the scene? Analyst Chris Whitmore of Deutsch Bank thinks that the answer is that nothing much will change. In short, according to a TUAW article, Whitmore says “We expect the slew of upcoming competition to fall flat from a user experience standpoint while struggl[ing] to materially undercut the iPad on price.” In this statement, he includes tablets from a host of manufacturers, including RIM, Dell, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and H-P. Apple started an entirely new marketplace, and everyone else is playing catch-up.
We know that there will be a plethora of Android-pads, some Windows-pads, and even WebOS- and QNX-pads. All of them are struggling to provide a better user experience at a lower price. So far, no one has even come close to doing so, even though they are trying to cut costs by making smaller tablets than the iPad. That just makes things worse. If anyone is going to make any headway against the iPad, they are going to have to build something a lot better, and right now it looks like everyone else is just trying to build clones.
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