It’s raining “tabs” and “pads” out
there with more to come.
This latest portable form factour
tablets hitting the market from HTC, Toshiba and “rumoured” from Amazon might
make you wonder where all this portable tab craze is going.
Let’s face it, Apple’s iPad has the
lion’s share of market penetration. It’s exquisitely designed and built, easy
to use and with more than 90,000 iPad specific apps, it obviously is the
consumers favourite.
The question is where do all the other
competitor products fit in minds of consumers?
I would like to share with you a recent
online study by http://www.Retrevo.com on tablets. The sample size was
over 1,000 folks distributed across gender, age, income and location in the United States.
Most responses have a confidence interval of 4% at a 95% confidence level. Yes,
it’s south of the border, but it gives you an idea how current consumers view
tablets.
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Some highlights:
1. iPad versus Android – Retrevo Asked:
Would you consider buying an Android tablet with similar features over a base
model $499 (US)
iPad?
– 79% of people would if it cost less
than $250
– 48% of people would if it cost less
than $300
– 31% of people would if it cost less
than $400
2. Of people planning on buying a
tablet this year:
– 50% said they were planning on buying
an iPad
– 21% said they were planning on buying an
Android Tablet
– 10% said they were planning on buying some
other kind of tablet
– 19% said they were planning on buying more
than one of these choices
3. Features – Of people
buying tablets, the feature that they found “most important” in the
next tablet they buy was:
48% Said low price
28% Said high
resolution display
20% Said better input
features like keyboards, speech recognition, etc.
Interestingly, Amazon
known for their very successful and competitive Kindle eBook reader rated the
highest purchase consideration, ahead of Dell, Samsung, Motorola, HP and RIM.
To me this means that
the price of all iPad competitors will be driven down, starting with a door
crasher price of a pending Amazon tablet. But does that mean iPads will join
the price war? Not likely, because Apple’s momentum, built by smart styling and
a huge application base, is simply worth the current price point, something
non-iPad users to understand until they actually own an iPad.
Android has momentum
in its many phones and tabs too, comparable to the Windows PC initial success
with all kinds of hardware choices making picking the right one more
challenging. Then there’s the lone-wolf tablets like RIM’s PlayBook and HP’s
TouchPad with their own niche operating systems.
Each of these iPad
competitors has their own appeal; some in fact have design and functionality
missing in the iPad world. If you already use an Android phone, you will like
the newer Android-based tablets.
But consider this:
iPad competitors would have to drop to less than $300 to even make a dent in
Apple’s sales numbers, not to mention the runaway App Store train.
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