Now that CES is over and done, we can finally relax after the flood of tablet related news. Or can we? Clearly many companies believe that tablets are the future of computing, or at least the untapped goldmine that only one company seems to have captured until now. With the iPad selling at a phenomenal rate (Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg they currently sell an iPad every 3 seconds, and still cannot keep up), other manufacturers have been showcasing what they have been working on for the past year, and Google showed off Honeycomb, the next release of its Android Mobile operating system.
What is interesting is how people have shifted their attention from netbooks (which were very hot sellers up until now) to tablets – and the statistics show that tablets are negatively affecting netbook sales at present. What makes this amazing is that the netbook market is highly commoditized with just about every PC manufacturer out there having a few netbook models in their PC range. On the other hand, tablets are currently dominated by one company and one device. Pretty amazing.
Charl came across this pretty great infographic showing the “Tablet Takeover”, and it perfectly shows what is going on, and why other manufacturers want to get in on this market. The question still remains however – are they maybe too late? The iPad has a year’s headstart, and iPad 2 is on the way. If the iPad 2 is a more evolutionary device with not a lot of OS changes, I reckon Apple might have some trouble on their hands. Android 3.0 looks like a much more full fledged operating system than iOS, but thats just my opinion. On the other hand, perhaps the very thing that makes iPad so popular is the simplicity of the operating system…
Anyway – here is the infographic (I recommend you download it and view it in full screen – it is pretty detailed)
