Apple’s iPad may not have made the same splash as its previous gadgets, but its timing remains impeccable. The first advert for the tablet, which is now confirmed for US shipment on April 3, cropped up by surprise during the Oscars ceremony on Sunday night.
On Friday, Apple had confirmed that the iPad would be available in the US on April 3. Despite recent rumors of manufacturing problems that could restrict the product to north America until later in the year, the company said it would start to ship to international markets in late April. On April 3, the Wi-Fi only iPad will be the only one on sale, but the 3G/Wi-Fi versions should join that later in the month. The greatest interest is expected to be in the Wi-Fi device because of its lower upfront cost ‘ plus no need to buy a data plan or casual 3G access from AT&T.
In the mounting ‘slate wars’, Hewlett-Packard has assumed the mantle of key challenger to Apple, and it unveiled adverts for its Slate product a day after the Oscars. It previewed its advertising campaign on its blog, and stressed that the Slate would support Adobe Flash, one of the most famous omissions from iPhone and iPad. However, unlike Apple, HP does not yet have a firm shipment date for its tablet, just promising ‘some time in 2010’.
The Slate will run Windows 7, but in fact the blog posting by Phil McKinney, CTO for HP’s personal system group, gives away little information about the product. Other tablets will soon appear too, including a ‘whole family’ promised by Dell, and a range of Android devices.
Despite this competition, Apple plans to build at least 5m iPads in the first half of this year, according to a research note from avid Apple watchers FBR Capital Markets. Citing production checks, analyst Craig Berger raised his estimate to the high end of his previous forecast, of 4m to 5m units.
FBR also increased its estimates for first quarter iPod and Apple PC builds, to 9.3m and 1m respectively. However, it cut the number of iPhones it believes Apple will make in the first half, from 7.5m to 6m. And on a sequential basis, iPhone and iPod builds are both set to decline by 50%, says the report, a steeper fall than for desktop and notebook shipments (33% and 43%). The falls are related to seasonal trends, and the lower impact in PCs compared to mobile gadgets reflects a faster than predicted recovery across the PC market.
Meanwhile, another firm that could really rock Apple’s boat is Amazon, should it evolve its Kindle ereader into a full web tablet platform. Signs are that it will ‘ it has launched a full developer program, and now seems to be planning a fully fledged browser, rather than the limited and experimental version currently available. Amazon’s Lab126 unit, which makes Kindle and other consumer products, has advertised for an engineer to help build “an innovative embedded web browser’.
The real challenge will not concern the technology, though, but the Amazon business model. One of the key aspects of the ereader model has been its potential to preserve publishers’ revenues by delivering an excellent reading experience, superior to free books and newspapers on the web. The incentive to purchase a subscription to a newspaper on the Kindle might be diluted if the same device could offer the free web-based version. And Amazon would probably need to renegotiate its contract with AT&T, which provides the embedded wireless connection for a fixed fee to the retailer. Ebooks cause little strain on the network but the same would not be true for a full browser, unless once again it was tied to Wi-Fi.