Monday October 11, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin
Suddenly, iPad is the biggest star on TV. Apple's tablet has made appearances in episodes of The Good Wife, NCIS, CSI: New York and Parenthood in the last two weeks.
And many businesses are supplying their employees with iPads, including the nursing school at New York's Pace University – I know this because my neighbor is a professor there and I've been enlisted to give her an iPad lesson.
iPad's sudden initial popularity is impressive, considering for the last decade, "experts," including Bill Gates, have been touting how tablets would take over the computing world.
Gates & Co. may have been right, but not in the way they predicted. After a 10-year lackluster tablet market, suddenly everyone – Dell, BlackBerry, Samsung, Microsoft with Windows Mobile 7 this week, and, at some point webOS tablets from HP – is pouring through the hole in the tablet wall Apple has breached. Tablet PCs appear to be the current darlings of the computing world.
But has it occurred to anyone that perhaps Apple's iPad didn't so much create a market for tablets as much as it created a market just for Apple's iPad?
Why Apple succeeded
In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn (warning: geek drooling ahead), Capt. Kirk is trying to thwart Kahn's initial attempt to steal the Genesis device by punching in Reliant's prefix code number. Vulcan navigator trainee Saavik asks Kirk what he's doing, and Kirk sagely replies, "You have got to learn WHY things work on a starship."
1. Specs Don't Matter. It’s unlikely that a long list of high-powered specs will be the magic bullet that will make their devices more popular than the iPad. There will likely be some attraction to features on the new devices that aren’t included on the iPad, (such as cameras, expandable memory, USB jacks) but it’s not clear that the sum of the parts will be greater than the whole.
And yet Apple has sold nearly 3.5 million iPads so far and is selling around 1.3 million a month.
Source: DTC
2: The App Gap. Apple’s closed system, which guarantees uniformity, differs from the Android operating system. Each Android app has to be optimized to work on a particular Android device. As a result, not all Android apps will work on all Android devices, especially tablets. Samsung has said there will be around 200 Galaxy S Tab-optimized apps at its launch out of tens of thousands of available Android apps.
If consumers want the most interoperable experience, they may choose the closed system that Apple provides. But even if they have things to do on their tablets, new non-iPad tablets have one other major drawback:
3: No Desktop Client. A smartphone doesn't really need apps. It has instant utility. You take it out of the box and you can make calls and send/receive texts. Apps and multimedia capabilities are nice, not necessary.
However, loading content onto a Wi-Fi only tablet out of the box is not as seamless or intuitive as it is with a closed ecosystem like Apple’s. I constantly run into Android phone users who tell me they have no content on their phones because they don't know how.
Although third party software developers offer iTunes-like desktop content sync clients client (http://www.doubletwist.com) for the Android operating system, they aren’t really as seamless or accessible as iTunes.
Without understanding WHY things work for iPad – especially necessity of an official desktop client – it's hard to imagine that iPad competitors can duplicate iPad’s initial success.
