The Current Tablet Market

The NY Times had a nice article on the tablet market.  In our own experience, tablets are very useful -- and factors include:

• The "It" factor:  Apple has built "it" -- and most people love the "it" and "cool" factor.  
• Size:  Many people love the 7" size of the Amazon Kindle -- and especially how the shorter size fits in your hand!  

• Price: Very good, name-quality, tablets can be bought from the $150 range up to $700!  

Tablets - Popular & New Arrivals

From the NY Times:

By keeping its tablet prices so high, he said, Apple could lose its place as the biggest tablet seller, just as it did with smartphones when it lost the first-place position to Samsung, which makes less expensive phones using Google’s Android software. The iPad still dominates the market with a 50 percent share, according to third-quarter figures from the research firm IDC, but that is down from 60 percent a year ago. Samsung is in second place with an 18 percent share, Amazon is third with 9 percent, and Asus, which makes Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, is in fourth with 8.6 percent of the market.

...

Complicating the decision on hardware, different tablets connect to different online stores for apps, music and video. If you have built your music and app collection on Apple devices, an Android tablet may mean starting from scratch, and vice versa.

Read more here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/technology/which-tablet-to-buy-among-dozens-confuses-shoppers.html

Amazon New Tablet this week?

Here is an excerpt from an article at Marketwatch.com.

Amazon.com Inc. has slated a news conference for Wednesday, and media speculation focuses on the prospect that the Internet retailing major will unveil a tablet computer to compete with Apple Inc.’s market-dominating iPad.

A new Kindle tablet would combine the retailer’s prominent electronic-book reader with connection to Amazon’sAMZN +0.17%  offerings of MP3 music and digital videos.
And the media talk says the tablet will run on Google Inc.’s GOOG +0.93%  Android operating system, which means access to the Android applications at Amazon’s app store.
The Wall Street Journal’s sources say the new tablet will have a roughly 9-inch screen; other reports say a 7-inch or 10-inch display is likely.

Early this month, TechCrunch.com reported that the Kindle tablet will have a 7-inch full-color screen and start at $250, half the cost of the cheapest iPad. Other analysts talk about $300 or less, reports say. 

Read more here:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazoncom-may-unveil-tablet-this-week-2011-09-25?link=MW_story_popular

Free or $99 Tablets?

Here's an excerpt from an interesting article in ComputerWorld.  Companies may try and experiment with pricing and subsidies (based on consumers purchasing content or services) -- to try and grab business from the Apple iPad -- which cannot be beaten at the $499 price point:

How low can they go?

When price competition hits a market, it usually happens gradually. But in the touch tablet market, the bottom seems to have suddenly dropped out.

HP shocked everyone when it announced last month that it would get out of the tablet business and stop making all webOS hardware. To move excess inventory, it announced a stunning $400 reduction in TouchPad prices.

Apparently $99 is a popular price point. The tablets were completely sold out in a matter of days.

Of course, that's not a sustainable price for HP. Pundits estimate that it costs HP about $300 to make each TouchPad, so the company is probably losing about $200 on every tablet sold.

That's why HP confused everybody when it announced that it would manufacture more TouchPads through Oct. 31 in order to respond to the "stunning" uptick in demand.

Read more here:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219715/Elgan_Will_tablets_soon_be_free_?source=toc

Our Favorite Tablets

The Apple iPad remains most people's favorite when it comes to tablets (and iPod Touches & iPhones).

The name-brand helps -- as well as the build-quality and great integration of hardware and software.  Adobe Flash remains unavailable on these Apple products, so in addition to the Apple tablets and iPods, here are some our other favorite tablets (particularly if you use websites that need flash).







Although not a full-fledged color-tablet, the Kindle remains one of our favorites.  The "experimental" web browsing and free 3G service makes the Kindle very valuable when you are on the road (especially if you do not have a smartphone to check your email).

This helps to save the cost of a cellphone data-plan (if you are a heavy-user of the internet, the Kindle browser may not be good enough for you, but for simple email and checking of news and sports scores, it works fine).

The less-expensive version of the Kindle does NOT offer the 3G service.





The Barnes & Noble Nook Color offers a beautiful 7-inch color display and it's browser will give most users the capabilities they need while they are on the road.

Although it doesn't offer free 3G service like the Kindle, it's browser is more functional -- and uses an Android-based operating system.  The most recent upgrade to Android makes flash available to Nook Color users.  Some folks use an SD upgrade to make the Nook function like a full-fledged tablet (with access to Android Market).







For just under $400, you can get a full-fledged tablet with flash capabilities from ASUS.  The ASUS Eee Transformer offers a 10.1-inch screen and has great reviews.

  

Tablets -- and the lack of Flash

Here's a good article on the reason why Flash is not readily-available on most tablets.

"The Real Reason Why Flash On Tablets Hasn't Happened Yet"

...

So why aren’t we seeing Flash-enabled browsers on tablets? Plenty of manufacturers have announced Flash capability but we’ve seen little evidence of it running well. Unfortunately, it turns out that Flash Wars is more than just a bit of industry politicking: there are some very tricky technical problems to implementing Flash on an embedded processor – and it’s not going to be solved by locking programmers into a room and yelling “fix it!” at them.

Flash was designed in the mid-90s for PCs and the new Internet era to display multimedia content in a web browser. It decodes video in software, combines the video and graphics in software, synchronizes the video and audio in software, handles Internet dropouts in software, and copies the results as fast as possible into the web browser. It relies on the CPU being fast and handling RAM accesses very quickly.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/flash-video-on-tablets-the-real-reason-why-its-not-happened-2011-3#ixzz1ReX0U7n6