Apple’s been eating everybody’s lunch so far, and competitors haven’t done much to fight back except for bringing tablets to the market that are either overpriced, too rough-around-the-edges or, in most cases, both.
Our own Harry McCracken summed the current state of tablets up well in his review of the BlackBerry PlayBook, saying:
“So far, only Apple has managed to release a tablet that doesn’t have a slightly experimental feel to it.
Now that the PlayBook is out, the next major milestone for tablets will likely be the release of HP’s promising TouchPad. All HP says about availability is that it plans to ship it ‘this summer.’ But you know what? After having used the Galaxy Tab, the Xoom, and the PlayBook, I’m in no rush. If the company needs more time to make the TouchPad as good as it can possibly be, that’s fine by me — and it just might be the smartest long-term strategy for HP, too.”
That appears to be the same long-term strategy that Nokia’s taking here, and it’s the right strategy because there aren’t really any notable advantages to rushing new tablets to market any more.
Samsung earned itself a slight advantage by being the first to market with a big-name Android tablet in the Galaxy Tab; Motorola earned itself a slight advantage by being the first to market with a big-name tablet running Google’s made-for-tablets Android 3.0 software; and BlackBerry earned itself a slight advantage by being first to market with a big-name tablet running an all new operating system. Now it’s time to bring tablets to market that are priced affordably and work well right out of the box.
Since there are now very few “slight advantages” to be won, it’s in tablet makers’ best interests to release tablets that don’t feel even the least bit experimental. I’d argue that the only exceptions to this rule are tablets that are priced so aggressively that people will put up with minor (minor!) kinks that still need to be worked out. Acer’s $450 Iconia tablet was a good start and Asus’ $400 Transformer tablet is even better. But anything north of a $450 starting price is just asking for trouble in the current tablet market.