Now before we get into a tablet war, we had better lay some ground rules and the most important one is ‘ not all tablets will do the same thing. What we have is Apple being prepared to introduce a new form factor, confident, as usual, that it will sell, and dragging the market with it to that form factor.
The iPad, we have said many times, can eat into several markets and it is taking a piece of each of the ebook, notebook, netbook, handheld games console, smartphone, portable media player and even digital photoframe markets. This is because it is general purpose and can do a little of everything.
But it doesn’t follow than in order to take a piece of a single one of these markets that the devices which follow have to be able to handle everything from web browsing to video play.
So when Sanjay Jha, the CEO of the Motorola home and handset divisions, stood up this week at the Barclays Capital conference and said that Motorola too will have a tablet, it doesn’t mean that it will have an iPad.
He talked about it being a ‘companion’ product to a TV that would sport a 7 to 10 inch screen, which would let users walk around their homes watching TV. This implies a lot of things. To watch TV, such as device will need to get its video, streamed from the TV or the internet, because streams are easier to protect and harder to pirate than copied files. Such a device might also be used also as a remote control to view other channels, without interrupting the channel you are on, to see what else is worth watching.
And since Google TV, based on Android, is aimed at the set top format, and allows access to internet delivered TV, most of its sent via WiFi over the home hub, it seems that either fully fledged Google TV or a subset, might also run on such a home tethered device.
This is the beauty of Android, and in the same way that it has given way to more than 20 device designs in the touch phone space, it can give way to multiple tablet designs ‘ some for portable use, some for home use, and no-doubt someone will come up with one (or more) for enterprise use. This, in fact, is the only way that Android can win that tablet war, and the only way that non-Apple players can even enter it. It would help if Google brought out a generic tablet reference platform, to help everyone build them with similar look and feel.
That doesn’t mean that Motorola won’t eventually shift into more of a general purpose tablet space, but it will understand, as Jha has often said, that if you do things on a standard operating system, you have to find some other way to differentiate your product than at the O/S level.
For instance Motoblur has tried to do this on the smart phone, and so far it has been fairly successful at that, and more successful than any bankrupt handset brand had any right to be. In fact any success for Motoblur must be considered as ‘spectacular.’ It puts us in mind of that old joke about the lost IBM salesman trying to find a client, when he stops at the roadside and asks for directions he is told by a local rustic that, ‘If I was going there I wouldn’t start from here.’ And if Motorola is going back to being a respected US multinational, operating in technology on the world stage, no-one would choose to start from where was a year ago.
But in understanding this, Motoblur could do a good job on a DLNA device, one which allows the remote control of multiple TV streams into multiple home devices, and it might well take tablet form.
In each device category we are likely to get a specialist tablet device. If Nokia has a tablet, it might also be a phone, if Sony has one, it might also be a portable gaming device, Amazon already has one dedicated to book reading (the Kindle) and media players and phones are all going down that route.
Each company beginning down the hard road of introducing tablet devices might want to focus on dominating a small niche area first, at a relatively low price, such as Motorola with a portable home TV tablet, before embarking on taking on Apple out in the big wide world of devices which can do everything. That way they can establish a differentiated experience in software, and then re-iterate that experience on a wider playing field.
Jha indicated both that Android was the right operating system for Motorola’s tablet adventure and that it would not introduce one product, but ‘products,’ plural.
Which brings us to another curious question. Right now there are at least three reports out which predict sales of the iPad. These stand on shipment guesswork and component shortfalls or pre-orders, instead of market demand. Instead of predicting iPad sales, once we are one year out we should be predicting tablet form-factor sales ‘ right across the range.
If Apple has made it ‘alright’ to have a tablet, and taken the lion’s share of general purpose tablet devices which can do a little of everything (supported by the Apple App Store), doesn’t it make sense to suggest that the entire market is at least double whatever the shipments will be for Apple.
We have already seen research reports suggesting that Android phones have either already overtaken the iPhone or are about to, so should we not expect the same with the emergence of non-Apple tablets. Won’t they be dominated by Android and eventually exceed Apple shipments?
Ovum for instance this week says that there will be 13 million iPad shipments by the end of 2011 (which is a touch conservative we think, especially if iTunes TV emerges), so shouldn’t it be pitching at more like 30 million tablet devices being sold in the same time frame, taking in 20 or 30 manufacturers?