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The Tablet Wars Really heat up 2011

• 09/03/11
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Digital Delirium’s March 2011 Blog

The Tablet Wars Have Begun!

In my last blog I did some 2011 predictions about the iPad competitors and since then things have really heated up in the tablet market. So in this blog we will continue our look at what is hot and what’s not. Then we will look at the secret life of SEO and why everyone should know how it works. The Reno Wordcamp is happening in June, don’t miss it! 

In what was billed as a surprise appearance, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad 2  March 2 in San Francisco The new pad looks great! With the improvements in process power, it is also 33 % thinner and now has front and back cameras. The battery power has been preserved at about 10 hours. This is impressive being that the new iPad is running a Dual-core A5 chip which makes the updated module two times faster than the previous module.

Most of the competition which are running the new Google Android 3 operating system is not getting anything close to this battery live.

Al of these updated features fine but are not revolutionary improvements. What might be more important to the success of this update is that the price has remained the same at $499.00. The older model is now priced at $399.

This is a tough price point for all the tablet competition which will be flooding the market place in the next couple of months.

I feel that Apple has done enough with this update to keep itself on top of the tablet market-place and has made it very difficult for the competition to make any real traction in this particular sector in 2011

HP TouchPad

HP had their recent February 9^th event where the public saw theTouchPad (seriously, they couldn’t come up with an original name?) tablet for the first time.  The TouchPad uses HP’s updated version of the WEBOS 3.0 operating system. I’ve got to say it was very impressive with “true multitasking” functions, and an interesting looking touch screen keyboard which allows users to adjust the size of the virtual keys. It also has a lovely 9.7-inch display (1024 x 768 screen resolution). On the CPU front it has a 1.2GHz Snapdragon, which in layman’s terms means that this baby has some real processing power! We still don’t know what the battery life will be like. With this much processing power the battery may not last days. It may be impressive but, an iPad killer is it not.

Problems

There are two basic problems with the TouchPad

1: Its price. It has been reported that HP is going to try and sell it at a price of $699.00. This is not a smart move on HP’s part. We will see a lot of Android non-Honeycomb power tablets that will be cheaper than the TouchPad. This price puts the tablet directly in competition, price wise, with the new iPad version 2. Only those who dislike Apple products will find the price acceptable.

2:  Application development. Will HP be able to attract the app development community to this platform? I feel HP needs to be much more aggressive in its pricing if it is going to attract the app development community in the numbers that it needs to make this platform a real success.

Android Honeycomb (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Honeycomb)

It is becoming apparent who the leaders are in the Google Android Honeycomb pack this year (see last month’s newsletter on Honeycomb). There are two strong competitors of the iPad; Motorola Xoom (unfortunately priced at $800) and the Samsung Galaxy.Xoom is getting good reviews but the price is stopping it from being touted as an iPad killer.  As of yet we don’t know the price of the Samsung Galaxy, however I can’t really see it being more than the present version of the Galaxy that runs on Android’s Froyo  for $599.99. I can’t really see any of the other Android tablet manufactures replacing Samsung’s leadership in this sector in 2011. We see how the Android Honeycomb works and it looks to be a great improvement on Froyo. However, we still don’t what the battery life will be like on this tablet.

RIM BlackBerry Playbook

BlackBarry’s Playbook was a surprise hit at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in January. It’s a lovely bit of hardware and runs using it own in house OS. There are strong online rumors that it going to be aggressively priced at around $500 or below. This is a much more attractive price than the Zoom or TouchPad. However RIM may have a hard time getting the app development community really interested in their platform.

Conclusion

I think the iPad version 2 is only going to increase the success of the brand this year. Apple has had almost 18 months of no competition to build up its development community and hardware. Learning what the consumer wants from a tablet has allowed Apple to develop its second generation tablet with them in mind. 

Android Honeycomb is the real competitor in this sector. Honeycomb is a great improvement on the previous Android OS however, there are still questions about the battery life of the new hardware that it need to run Honeycomb.

The bigger question is will there be enough oxygen in this market for multiple players? Remember the war between Beta and VHS? There were only two yet VHS ended up being the only tape player on the market.

The Playbook looks to be a lovely bit of technology. However I just don’t see it becoming a real force in this sector. Though Zoom andGalaxy are getting good reviews they may price themselves out of the market. This leaves us with the Touchpad. If HP gets more realistic on it pricing I think it could have a chance of being a real player in this sector.

Digital Delirium Sponsor Reno Worpcamp 2011

Reno Wordcamp 2011 on June 4^th and 5^th  I attended this event last year and I liked the great Wordpress community spirit at the event. I was also impressed with the way the event was organized by the events main organizers Colin Loretz and Chelsea Otakan. These are two local and very talented young individuals. We as a business community need to help and strongly encourage people like this in Northern Nevada. Wordcamp is for everybody who is interested in blogging and using one of the most popular and flexible tools on the market to build blogs or more business focus web sites.

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