The Coming Tablet Wars

August 10, 2010
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WRITTEN BY
August 10, 2010

Eric Wise

In the ear­ly 1990’s Apple released the New­ton Mes­sage Pad at a dark time when the oust­ed Steve Jobs was not guid­ing the Apple fran­chise.  The Apple New­ton was the first busi­ness and con­sumer tablet plat­form, and con­sid­ered the grand­fa­ther of the cur­rent Apple iPad.  With almost twen­ty years of tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tion since the release of the New­ton, it seems appar­ent that Apple final­ly got it right.  The nat­ur­al exten­sion of the super suc­cess­ful iPhone helped bust open sales of the iPad beyond ear­ly pro­jec­tions.  But soon the tablet mar­ket­place will become very crowd­ed with a num­ber of strong con­tenders.  Can Apple main­tain its lead and edge in this space?
Over the next six to nine months, major play­ers such as Dell, HP, Black­Ber­ry, and Microsoft are poised to shake­up and accel­er­ate the mar­ket adop­tion of tablet devices.  The iPad release ear­li­er this year from Apple has explod­ed the demand for this form fac­tor.  Uti­liz­ing the oper­at­ing sys­tem from the iPhone, they essen­tial­ly cre­at­ed an over­sized iPad Touch with WiFi and 3G capa­bil­i­ties.  This ear­ly iPad release from Apple has built the mar­ket for the form fac­tor, but will Apple be able to com­pete when con­sumers start turn­ing to improved afford­abil­i­ty and more features? 
Chal­lenges will undoubt­ed­ly plague the new com­peti­tors in the space as well.  Microsoft, Black­ber­ry, Dell, and oth­ers will have to face the chal­lenge of build­ing an appli­ca­tion store as well as lur­ing the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty if they are to pose any threat to Apple’s dominance
How some of the new tables line up:
Apple 
– Rumored for fourth quar­ter this year with 3 size ver­sions (5.6 inch, 7 inch, and the cur­rent 9.7 inch).  The 5.6 and 7 inch are rumored to tar­get the grow­ing eBook read­er mar­ket.  A great deal of spec­u­la­tion is avail­able for the next release, but details from Apple are scarce.
Dell 
– The upcom­ing release is expe­ri­enc­ing a large vol­ume of pre-orders on the com­pa­ny web­site.  Dell will be court­ing user in the mar­ket­place between the net­book and the Smartphone.
  • Ini­tial release will be a hybrid tablet-Smart­phone (Abil­i­ty to make phone calls)
  • Medi­um form fac­tor of only 6” wide x 3.1” high x .4” thin, and sports a 5” screen
  • Inte­grat­ed social media, Google maps with nav­i­ga­tion with turn by turn, and dam­age-resis­tant Goril­la glass screen
  • Google Android Mul­ti­task­ing Oper­at­ing Sys­tem will run the device
  • Dell to offer a Mobile Appli­ca­tion Store with Dell Streak applications
HP 
– With the recent acqui­si­tion of Palm, the HP tablet releas­es are more dif­fi­cult to pre­dict.  The cur­rent press releas­es dis­cuss two tablets, a Win­dows 7 device for busi­ness, and a sec­ond tablet run­ning the Palm Oper­at­ing Sys­tem (webOS) for the con­sumer market.
  • Ini­tial press leaks sug­gest a Fall 2010 release for the Win­dows 7 slate device, tar­get­ed for busi­ness users
  • It will uti­lize an 8.9” screen, cam­era for video and pho­tos, and sup­port for an elec­tron­ic pen (capa­bil­i­ties to write sim­i­lar to a sheet of paper)
Black­ber­ry 
– Research in Motion (Mak­er of the Black­ber­ry phones) is ful­ly focused on the cur­rent release of its new phone line­up to com­pete with Apple.  The rumors have RIM launch­ing a new tablet device in Decem­ber 2010 or ear­ly 2011.
  • Will sup­port flash with hard­ware based flash accel­er­a­tor (Apple iPad, no sup­port for flash)
  • The screen will be sim­i­lar to the iPad (9.7 inches)
  • Con­nec­tiv­i­ty will be Wi-fi, and Blue­tooth wire­less.  Blue­tooth will also allow con­nec­tiv­i­ty through the Black­ber­ry device.  No direct con­nec­tion to the car­ri­er network.
Microsoft
 – The next release of the tablet or slate for Microsoft is fuzzy at best, and the ini­tial device will most like­ly be the HP slate device.  Oth­er poten­tial Microsoft devices to be released by the end of the year run­ning Win­dows 7 Oper­at­ing Sys­tem include; Sam­sung, ASUS, Toshi­ba, and Sony.  Busi­ness capa­ble tablets will be pro­duced by a hard­ware part­ner, and the oper­at­ing sys­tem will be a vari­ant of Win­dows 7.  The rumor is that they will also deliv­er a con­sumer tablet ver­sion based on the new Win­dows Phone 7 Oper­at­ing Sys­tems, which will be sim­i­lar in design to the Apple iPad.
India -
 Anoth­er inter­est­ing new entry comes from the gov­ern­ment of India.  The Indi­an Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy along with the Indi­an gov­ern­ment devel­oped the first $35 touch screen tablet com­put­er.  Their ulti­mate goal is to dri­ve the price down clos­er to $10 per unit.  The pro­to­type device runs the open-source Lin­ux Oper­a­tion Sys­tem, does not uti­lize a hard dri­ve and can run on solar pow­er.  It will sup­port web brows­ing, word pro­cess­ing, and oth­er appli­ca­tions built for the device.  The Indi­an gov­ern­ment is under­tak­ing a new edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tive for stu­dents, and plans to sub­si­dize the device to increase adop­tion.  This new tablet could change the way chil­dren learn, and increase lit­er­a­cy rates worldwide.
Regard­less of how you may lean as a con­sumer today, you will have many choic­es com­ing in the near future.  Time will tell who will be the vic­tor in the end of “The Tablet Wars”.
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