

There isn't really much of a tablet market  - yewweitan
http://www.marco.org/2546655554

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blinkingled
Marco Arment, John Gruber and company are so obnoxiously biased against
anything that is not Apple that it isn't worth clicking on any links pointing
to their sites. It's deja vu all the times if you do - no one can compete with
Apple, everyone other than Apple is doomed. Ad-nauseum. With implausible or
otherwise manufactured/subjective beliefs sometimes sprinkled in there to make
them feel like logical reasons. There isn't anything insightful there - just
bigotry.

"Neither Google nor Microsoft will ever be able to tailor their software to
other manufacturers’ specific (and varied) hardware devices as well as Apple
can (and does) with theirs."

Really? Marco Arment can predict the future? Do we lose all hope that people
will do anything better than Apple? Even in Marco's little part of the world
it sounds outrageously short sighted. You can say what you want against
everything non-Apple and that would of course be your opinion (as opposed to
universally accepted truth) - but this is going too far, even for Marco Arment
class of people.

He goes preaching about Apple's integrated experience, "superior everything"
and ponies - but you know what the whole world is not buying the iPad
universally - Samsung sold a million Galaxy Tabs, Androids are already
outselling Apple worldwide and reason for that is not that the people buying
them are stupid - people just have different needs and tastes. Banging on the
"teh superior AAPL drum" with a sad tune of everyone else's suckiness for ever
is not going to change that.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I've been surprised by the number of times I've seen the Galaxy Tab listed on
best tech of 2010 lists. Often by people who also own iPads.

I've not had a chance to play with one myself (though I've held one in my
hand, turned off) but since some (but not all) of the early reviews were
particularly scathing, this seems a bit odd to me.

I think the possibilities are a) Android fanboys lying about the Tab and how
good it is b) Apple fanboys lying about the Tab and how bad it is, c) that,
for some people, with certain needs the Galaxy Tab is already better than
Apple's iPad, due to size, weight, hotspot capabilities, built in cameras,
network availability or whatever and that the things that Arment and Gruber
value aren't universal values.

~~~
blinkingled
I actually wondered about the mixed Tab reviews too. Andy Ihnatko's review
gave me a clue - the Apple fan reviewers who compared the Tab against iPad
almost invariably did not like it. But those who looked at it independent of
the iPad, like Ihnatko does in this review -
[http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/2680861-452/tab-i...](http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/2680861-452/tab-
ipad-device-android-mobile.html) \- liked it ( a lot in Andy's case).

Bottom line my take is that it is a good device in its own right and the price
over iPad is at least somewhat justified given the additions of 2 cameras,
more RAM, SD Card, better GPU etc. and the 7" size is definitely a good one.

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rlmw
Allegedly Samsung have sold 1 million Tabs within 2 months of putting it on
sale. [0] This isn't as fast as the ipad, but it does demonstrate that there's
a market for non-ipad tablets. One of the things thats quite important in this
market is that Android 3 is meant to be rather tablet oriented, and I think
that will address his concerns. There certainly are a lot of cheap, poor
quality, android tablets on the market at the moment but if you look at the
Android phone market it also went this way. Initially people thought it would
be loads of cheap asian cloners and it turned out that the best selling
android phones were actually the high quality devices.

Now I don't want to start some 'Android vs iOS' discussion, buy whatever
product suits your taste - thats your choice, but I do think its a little bit
hasty to write off tablets from other manufacturers at this moment in time.
Perhaps I've misunderstood and he is only talking about the present - but it
seems like the author thinks there will never be a serious competitor.

[0]
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9199678/Update_Galaxy...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9199678/Update_Galaxy_Tab_sales_hit_1M_mark)

~~~
mboyle
Have actual consumers purchased a million galaxy tabs or is some portion of
that million unit figure inventory that carriers have purchased but not
necessarily sold to end users?

~~~
blinkingled
Actually sold - [http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/03/samsung-sells-one-
million...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/03/samsung-sells-one-million-
galaxy-tab-units-throws-an-android-pa/)

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zephyrfalcon
Well, no, there isn't really much of a tablet market. It's an emerging market;
a year ago it didn't even exist until the iPad single-handedly created it.
Everybody else is still trying to catch up. Right now your choices are
basically, an iPad, or something else that probably isn't nowhere near as good
(unless you count Kindles and Nooks which are much more specialized devices).

However, in a few years or so, I can totally see casual users ditching their
(in their eyes) complicated PCs and netbooks in favor of a tablet of some
kind, as long as it does what they want (watch a video, send email, go on
Facebook, listen to music, play a game, etc).

~~~
Pewpewarrows
The iPad popularized the Tablet market, it didn't create it. Tablets have
existed since 2000.

~~~
jawee
Although not a tablet in the current sense, I´ve been happily using my Maemo-
powered ¨Internet Tablet¨ since before Apple made touchscreens.

~~~
seabee
The problem is tablet PCs, Nokia Internet Tablets and iPads are all different
concepts of a 'tablet', confusingly called the same thing. Compare to Macs and
PCs which are both clearly 'personal computers'.

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nazgulnarsil
the main argument against tablets (bad software that actively interferes with
usability) is going away. The market for tablets that are basically just
laptops with a different form factor remains what it was before the ipad:
small. the market for a tablet that is easy to hop on the couch with and surf
for casual content is huge.

~~~
joeguilmette
80-90% of computer users never leave the browser. The tablet will take over.
Everything except power users will be using tablets in 5 years.

~~~
axod
80-90% of websites use keyboard as an input mechanism.

I'm not seeing why a tablet is so massively better than a netbook/laptop.

~~~
jsz0
Removing the abstraction of a pointing device and interacting directly with
the GUI is a big deal. If you watch most people use a computer they spend the
vast majority of their time tracking a pointing device and occasionally typing
some text. Laptops are designed around the idea that most users are going to
spend the vast majority of their time entering text and occasionally using a
pointing device to track on-screen. Of course for some people this is
perfectly appropriate because they _do_ spend the vast majority of their time
entering text.

~~~
axod
So just make more touchscreen laptops.

A tablet is just irritating because it cant stand up on its own.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I've got a touchscreen laptop. It lets my 3-year old muck around with Tux
Paint and educational Flash games but it's not much more useful than that.
You'd really need both a transformable hardware setup, and two entirely
different UI paradigms for it to make sense. And it would still be hard to
compete with a netbook plus a tablet for most folks.

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kenjackson
If you count the Nook Color, I know more people that got Nook Color than iPads
for XMas. Nook Colors were crazy sellers from what I can see anecdotally.

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proee
The nook from B&N is recently reported as their new best-selling product. So
I'd say that the non-iPad tablets are quickly gaining momentum.

Would like to see some data backing up the author's claims.

~~~
Bud
The Nook is a reader, not a full-featured tablet. Apples and oranges.

~~~
rlmw
I don't know which nook he is referring to, but the Nook Color is an Android
tablet basically with their e-reader software installed. Its not quite as
clear cut as all that.

~~~
nlawalker
I've never played with another Android device to compare, but I think that the
Nook is actually somewhere in-between.

From what I can tell, the Nook runs a customized version of Android. The most
important customizations are the home screen (the desktop that can only show
Nook books purchased from BN), the overall UI, and the fact that you _can't
install apps on it without rooting it_.

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Pewpewarrows
Apple sold a bit more than 4 million iPads the most recent quarter that they
released sales reports for.

Samsung's Galaxy Tab has sold well over 1 million this past quarter thus far.
The Android OS also does not officially support Tablets until the upcoming
Honeycomb release.

By that comparison there isn't a PC market either. Macs certainly aren't even
close to selling at a rate of one-third of the Windows machines right now.

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estacado
The tablet market is too young to be regarded as miniscule. Software-wise, we
have only started to think about touch input seriously. There still so much
that can be done.

~~~
Bud
This strikes me as the right answer. We're not really sure yet. What if you
can do input via brainwave headsets at 100 wpm in 5 years? Not impossible; you
can type via brainwaves, right now.

Tablets could become nearly magical in less than a decade.

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jawee
I know about five (non-techies) that got Nook Colors and a few people that got
Tabs (3 to be exact). It´s probably partially because of the stronghold
Verizon holds in my area so AT&T isn´t worth it... there is literally no AT&T
service within a 10 mile radius of my house and school. I only know one person
who got an iPad; well someone that posted on Facebook. I´m not sure I get the
original argument.

~~~
jamesk2
I know many more people who have Kindles or iPads and nobody who own a Nook or
a Tab... I live in the SF Bay Area but still, it's an oddly different market
where you are... where are you?

~~~
jawee
I am in a suburb a good ways south of Atlanta, Georgia. Apple seems to have a
relatively low market in general in my immediate vicinity except for iPods.

