It seems that Amazon’s much rumored Android tablet may make its debut in the second half of this year, with Taiwanese manufacturer Quanta Computer reported to be starting production. This could be the much-needed slate to put real life into Android Honeycomb. So far, several high profile Honeycomb launches have scarcely ruffled the feathers of the iPad, and vendors are now hastily presenting models like the Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab as ‘first generation’, even experimental devices. RIM is taking the same line for PlayBook, promising far greater delights to come in future releases ‘ but sales will rely on the nice design of the Apple challengers actually supporting a compelling user experience.
This will rely in part on improvements to Honeycomb ‘ filling in some developer gaps to attract a wider range of specifically tablet optimized apps; Google giving partners full freedom to create user interfaces that have the impact of the HTC Sense UI, but leverage the slate format too. The key will also be content purchasing and viewing, and here Apple and Amazon are streets ahead of any other players with their well-honed store experiences, wide ranging media deals and familiar user interfaces. For that reason, Apple will be far more concerned by apps like the Kindle Store ‘ a popular feature on the iPad, despite the product’s own iBookstore ‘ than by the fast processors and show-off design of Xoom.
The showdown is likely to come in time for the holiday season, and perhaps as early as September, with Taiwan’s Digitimes, citing sources in the supply chain, revealing that Amazon was targeting 800,000 units a month by the Christmas period, and that the tablet will feature an e-ink screen.
That tidbit, if true, gives some pause for thought. If the display is e-ink only, it would put it into the hybrid ereader/tablet category alongside the Barnes & Noble Nook Color, and would presumably extend the Kindle brand rather than forming a wholly new product line and branding for Amazon. This would run the risk of producing a compromise gadget that would not compete fully with the iPad, though it would see Amazon sticking to its comfort zone of a device geared entirely to content delivery (media sales being its real goal rather than device shipments).
The giant retailer recently introduced a cut-price Kindle with adverts on its homescreen, and is expected to leverage the ereader in various ways to boost content sales, perhaps offering free devices with subscriptions to newspapers or the Amazon Prime service. Cheaper Kindles could, in turn, leave a space for a higher end ereader with tablet, video and color magazine capabilities ‘ and a superior reading screen to the iPad’s. More attractive, though, would be a fully dual-mode tablet with ereader and LCD or even AMOLED screens, as enabled by technologies such as Pixel Qi.
An Amazon tablet would have a far heavier focus on streamed content and cloud storage than the iPad, since this is an area where the retailer is well ahead of Apple and Google, as seen with its recent launch of the Cloud Drive and music service. The tablet will also work with Amazon’s new Android app store. Since this is accessible from any Android device, many question why Amazon needs gadgets of its own, but the likely answer is to create a superior user experience for its own stores and so raise their profile and attract customers away from Android Marketplace. The same two-tiered strategy is already seen in Kindle ebooks, which can be downloaded and read via an app on a PC or smartphone (or iPad), but which come with an optimized experience on the Kindle ereader itself. The ebook battle may heat up further when Apple starts enforcing new rules barring in-app purchasing, which could lead to a stand-off with Amazon as they already have with Sony’s bookstore.
By the time the Amazon tablet ships the other major vendors may have got their act together and upgraded their tablets. For now, though, they are trying the patience of consumers with constant ‘jam tomorrow’ hints and statements. At this week’s BlackBerry World, RIM was stressing that the current PlayBook is very much a first attempt. In particular, it promised to fill the massive void left by the lack of native email and calendar applications, though no date was confirmed. It also showed off various promised applications designed for the PlayBook, including a Facebook app, 7Digital’s music store, the essential ‘Angry Birds’ game, and, of course, Microsoft Bing ‘ though RIM said it was ‘not just thinking about Bing as an app but as a highly integrated experience’.
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is the king of ‘jam tomorrow’, given the transition phase of the product range, and he was putting a positive spin on the firm’s enforced delay in attacking the tablet space. He said the company would not rush a device into the market just to jump on the bandwaggon, but would focus on creating a tablet with a “uniquely Nokia perspective’. Whether that strikes joy or depression into the heart depends on your view of the Nokia design approach, but the most interesting question is which OS the firm will use.
It will launch its first WP7 smartphones late this year, but so far Microsoft has kept the OS away from large screens, to the irritation of some OEMs. Nokia could have the influence to persuade Microsoft away from this shortsighted strategy, and would be unlikely to follow its partner’s preferred route of supporting full Windows 7 on tablets in the short term and then moving to converged Windows 8. However, given the lengthy timescales for Nokia’s turnaround, it may just hold off on the tablet space until Windows 8 appears – which will span PCs and mobile devices, as well as Intel and ARM chips.
Its other option would be to adopt MeeGo, the Linux-based OS it co-developed with Intel, but which has been sidelined in its strategy by the WP7 deal. When it announced its partnership with Intel, it was clear that MeeGo was designed to help the firms leapfrog smartphone specialists when it came to a new breed of mobile products ‘ larger screened, and centered primarily around cloud/browser applications rather than traditional, localized mobile apps. Nokia could still seek to emulate HP and others by adopting a fully modern and cloud-oriented platform for tablets.
Elop wasn’t giving many clues, though he was certainly not making a firm commitment to a Windows-only roadmap. “We could take advantage of Microsoft technology and software, and build a Windows oriented tablet, or we could do things with some of the other software assets that we have,” he told Finnish journal YLE. “Our team right now is assessing what’s the right tablet strategy for Nokia.”
He acknowledged the challenge of making an impact in a market where most product launches have been me-too gadgets. “There are now over 200 different tablets on the marketplace. Only one of them is doing really well,” he continued in the interview. “And, my challenge to the team is, I don’t want to be the 201st tablet on the market that you can’t tell from all of the others. We have to take a uniquely Nokia prospective.”