If you are in the market for a tablet, and you don’t want to be a sheep (read: get an iPad), then you have many choices - Toshiba AT100, Motorola Xoom, ASUS EEE Transformer, Acer Iconia, and maybe Samsung if / when they win the patent war with Apple.
I still remembered when the first Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″ tablet arrived in Australia, it was retailed for $999. That’s one dollar change after you hand the sales person ten $100 notes. TEN, I say! My first reaction was, “Who the hell is going to buy that?” And no doubt many others asked the same question.
It was smaller than the iPad, it wasn’t even running an Android that is optimised for the tablet form factor, it was in every way inferior to the iPad, and somehow cost some 40% more than it. Samsung was insane to release it at that price point. And I was right. Price started falling not long after and with new tablets coming to the market with much better specs, the 7″ Tab kind of fizzled and died. The Dell Streak 5 suffered similar fate.
Looking at the market now, it seems the Android tablet market is having a – to borrow a financial terminology – correction. When the Xoom was first released, it was over $800, the cheapest I’ve seen now is $634; the Iconia ($549 originally) now $484. The Transformer was $399US on Amazon, recently selling for as low as $349US ($338AUD).
Meanwhile, Apple is unfazed, still selling the iPad from $554. And people are buying it.
It’s not too hard to see why there is such a discount war. With the vanilla Honeycomb installed on the tablets, every Android device looks the same. I went to a retail store and played with every single Android tablet they have on display, and every single one of them looks the same. What differentiate the AT100 and the Iconia? They both have similar specs, so why should I buy a Toshiba over an Acer? Just because one has USB and the other one doesn’t?
Choices are good, but when there are too many choices, it creates confusion among consumers, and confusions are bad.
With Lenovo and HTC joining into the fray later this year, the Android tablet market is getting more crowded than ever. Are Android tablets manufacturers shooting themselves in the foot by undercutting each other? They’re definitely not making a significant dent into Apple’s dominance with the iPad. So all they are doing is pushing each other out of the market. HP is a clear example of this (even though the TouchPad doesn’t run Android).
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