Google and Apple are both launching tablets this week, and facing up to the inherent problem with this form factor – consumers upgrade them far more rarely than smartphones. As handset sales growth slows, especially in developed markets, tablets will not provide an adequate replacement, especially as their prices have fallen at a far more rapid rate than those of early smartphones. Therefore all the vendors will urgently need to stoke customer interest in alternative, and perhaps more disposable, devices, such as smartwatches, to offset the impending cellphone (and PC) slowdown.
The iPad has had a very different buying pattern to its handset stablemates, and its contribution to Apple’s results is far more erratic. While smartphone upgrade cycles have been reduced to between one and two years, tablets are three years or more. About 14% of iPads in use in the US are still original 2010 models, according to analysis by Kantar Worldpanel. About one-third of the base is iPad 2, while the one-year old iPad Air comprises only 9%.
Another problem for sales is that users are more likely to hand down an older model to a family member or friend, or to share one tablet between a whole family. Kantar’s Carolina Milanesi told CNET: “Everyone wants a phone, and everyone wants their own phone. Tablets are different.”
Gartner says that growth in tablet sales is “slowing quickly” and will be only 11% this year in unit terms, to reach about 229m devices – last year’s year-on-year leap was 55%. The iPad family is the market leader with 27% share in the second quarter, followed by Samsung on 17% with Galaxy Note and Tab. But the iPad has fallen as a percentage of Apple’s sales, to 16% in its fiscal third quarter from 18% a year earlier, at a time when the Macs are growing.
So the new iPad models will be important to the holiday season performance. In a rare blunder, Apple seemed to have leaked details of the new iPads, expected to be the centrepiece of its Thursday launch event, by mistake, rather than by design. An image published on the company’s iPad User Guide for iOS 8 on Wednesday suggested that the event would produce an iPad Mini 3 and an iPad Air 2.
There appeared to be nothing very new about the devices, which had similar physical designs and user interfaces to their predecessors, suggesting a fairly workaday upgrade event – though, of course, there was plenty of speculation about other new products such as a revamped Apple TV.
The main new tablet feature revealed in the online document was the addition of the TouchID fingerprint sensor, which is already part of the new iPhones and Apple Pay. The new Mini and iPad Air sport iSight and FaceTime cameras, volume buttons and headset jacks, and the Mini 3 also has a nanoSIM slot for mobile broadband connectivity.
The iPad Air 2 is expected to run on the new A8 processor, the same as in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Meanwhile, Google revealed the first phablet in its own-branded Nexus range, which exists to showcase the standard, Google-focused Android user experience and software platform. So the devices show off the newest release of the operating system, Android L, now also gaining the traditional sweet-related name associated with this OS family – Lollipop.
This was a soft launch for Lollipop and its showcase devices, reportedly because Google teams went to the wire to complete the release. The hallmark of Lollipop, which was described at the Google I/O conference earlier in the year, will be its flexibility to support the growing variety of device sizes and shapes – while also trying to unite the Android world around Google’s preferred user interface. In a blog post, Android chief
Sundar Pichai said: “Lollipop is designed to be flexible, to work on all your devices and to be customized for you the way you see fit.”
The Nexus 6 phablet was built by Motorola Mobility, soon to be part of Lenovo. It has a 5.9-inch quad-HD display with a resolution of 1440×2560 pixels, and runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 quad-core 2.7GHz processor with Adreno 420 graphics. It has a 13-megapixel rear-facing and a 2-mp front-facing camera and claims 24 hours of battery life – or six hours from a charging time of just 15 minutes. The device will go on sale in the US in November through the main carriers, and unlocked versions will be available through the Google Play Store.
The Nexus 9 is the first tablet from HTC since its failed Flyer device of three years ago. It comes with an 8.9-inch IPS LCD display and weights just over one pound. Its processor is a a 64-bit dual-core Nvidia Tegra K1 with Kepler graphics chip. It has an 8-mp rear-facing, and a 1.6-mp front-facing camera, but no expandable storage. It will go on pre-order on Friday.