“Tablet computers were the highlight of Asia’s largest computer exhibition, the annual Computex Taipei, which was expected to attract as many as 120,000 visitors this week after opening its doors in the Taiwan capital on June 1,” Martin J. Young reports for Asia Times Online. “The five-day event showcases 1,715 exhibitors, including some big industry names such as Asus, Acer, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Microsoft and Nvidia.”
“The strong emphasis on tablet computers follows Apple’s success with the iPad,” Young reports. “More than 30 versions of rivals to the American company’s handheld touch-screen device were expected to be showcased. Apple claims to have sold over 2 million iPads within 60 days of the product launch earlier this year.”
“Taiwan-based AsusTek announced a powerful tablet computer aptly named the Eee Pad, which will run with Windows 7 and be driven by a dual core Intel processor,” Young reports. “The unit, a direct rival to the iPad, will be available in 10-inch and 12-inch versions starting at US$399. The cheapest iPad on the market, with only 16 gigabyte storage, no 3G, and very limited specifications, starts at $499, so the one real player in the market so far could soon face very intense competition.”
MacDailyNews Take: Keep dreamin’, Marty.
Young continues, “Other manufacturers such as Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP Compaq are expected soon to follow suit with their own tablets, so consumers are likely to have a lot more choice over hardware specifications, operating systems and software applications if they haven’t already shelled out for an iPad.”
“The winner in the long run is likely to be the company that offers the most apps – small software applications that can be downloaded and installed on the handheld device, be it a tablet or a smart-phone,” Young reports. “At the moment Apple has it in the bag with three years lead over its competitors and around 200,000 apps in its online store, but Google is catching up fast.”
MacDailyNews Take: Over 210,000, Marty. And, if you consider Android having less than a quarter of Apple’s iPhone OS apps while Apple’s app count keeps increasing everyday as “catching up,” you need a dictionary.
Young continues, “Google, by making its Android software open source and allowing anyone to develop anything without all of the cloak-and-dagger secrecy and restrictions found in the Apple camp, is bound to emerge as the platform of choice sooner or later.”
MacDailyNews Take: There’s nothing biased in good ol’ Marty’s reporting, is there?
Young continues, “Adding to this momentum is the fact that Android will be running on devices from multiple manufacturers and carriers; and that around 57% of Android’s apps are free compared with only 25% of Apple’s, according to analytics from Distimo, a website that monitors app stores. In the world of technology, the two essential ingredients for product success seem to be choice and the f-word – ‘free’ – and Google offers both.”
MacDailyNews Take: Young continues: Don’t buy Apple products. Instead buy cheap knockoffs from Asia that are based on angelic Google’s fake iPhone OS. Why worry about patent infringement lawsuits overhanging Android, when you can have an insecure device with inferior software? Who wants the real thing when you can have a cheap half-assed fake for 67-cents less? (Of course, we wrote that, not Young, but he might as well have.)
Young continues, “Negotiations continued this week on whether to include Microsoft’s Bing search engine as the prominent option on Apple’s iconic iPhone, which at present has Google as the dominant search option. With Android’s share of the mobile-phone market already surpassing Apple’s, the latter now appears to view its former arch enemy as less of a threat than the upstart Google.”
MacDailyNews Take: Android’s share of the mobile-phone market has not surpassed Apple’s. Period.
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)
Source: Gartner (May 2010)
Misusing a limited NPD survey that fails to measure little niches, like, oh, say, the business market, is the province of fools and liars. Which is it, Marty, are you a liar or a fool or, most likely, both?
• Apple: Widely-misreported NPD data does not provide complete picture of U.S. smartphone market – May 11, 2010
• Don’t be misled by poorly-reported NPD Android vs. iPhone stats – May 11, 2010
Full article – Think Before You Click™ – here.
MacDailyNews Take: People who pine for poor imitations of Apple products would be perplexing if we didn’t understand that the root of it is money, if not a pathological hatred of quality and superiority.
Suicide bombers
That should read over 30 future iPad victims.
Sick and funny, breeze.
“Toucha toucha toucha touch me, I wanna be dirty
Thrill me chill me fulfil me
Creature of the night.”
Windows 7 runs like crap in a 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo, I can’t imagine how it will run in a 400 dollar tablet. You may as well flush your 400 dollars down the drain. But hey at least it will have USB ports, LOL.
What is even worse about this FUD is that he is reporting from an Asian perspective so when he says that Android market share has overtaken Apple he would be implying he is either talking about Asia of the World as a whole as no American market is even mentioned. This of course makes the disinformation even more pronounced as in no statistics is Android even in the same league as Apple in the World market. Of course his lies are entirely down to the fact that he is rooting for his local manufacturers but the lack of subtlety is laughable.
“”Negotiations continued this week on whether to include Microsoft’s Bing search engine as the prominent option on Apple’s iconic iPhone”
How does he know that? Did he make it up, or is he just regurgitating a rumor as fact?
I guess he’s saying a higher percentage of Android developers don’t want to make money. Right.
Like fish in a barrel…
What a crock of bullshit! Strange how tablet computers have been coming Real Soon Now for ten years and suddenly, now that Apple have shown the entire industry how it’s done, every bugger on the planet is claiming to have an iPad killer in the pipeline. R&D;lead times on such devices have to be measured in years but all these manufacturers now have tablets coming out a scant few weeks after the launch of the iPad.
Once again, Apple lead and everyone else follows. There isn’t a single original thought among the lot of them. What a bunch of pathetic fools!
=:~)
I would wager that 25% of Apple’s 210,000 apps being free still amounts to more free apps than whatever 57% of Google’s apps amounts to, which means that Apple still offers more choice and more ‘f-word’ apps
This is a good thing, let these cheap Asian knock-offs come stateside. People will flock to Walmart and Costco to buy them, thinking that at the bargain price of $399 (after a $100 rebate) they’re getting a great deal. Hard reality will set in once these Windows 7 driven tablets are tested in action. Ha! That little spinning hour-glass will become the brand logo of the Walmart tablet set. Hey, that would make a great t-shirt: “I bought my tablet at Walmart… for real cheap!” with the little spinning hourglass as the logo.
C’m on people!! ,Apps with ads are free!!Software developers they all need to make a living, they all have bills to pay, so let’s be ” fair “, we need to support: Quality And creativity.No all good things are “F”.
I wish that I had 629 friends that would each loan me $1.
Wi-Fi + 3G
over 230,000 apps numnuts
So, according to this frigtard, the iPhone OS has more free apps, than Android has in total? I think he just proved the iPhone OS will win.
@Dirty Pierre le Punk
Yes, and not only that… a very high percentage of the apps can be had for 99¢ – $2.99. Somehow I doubt there are many comparable quality apps in that price range on the other app stores.
And yes… they’ll all run Flash, they’ll all have USB ports and card readers and cameras. They’ll use a stylus, have voice and none of them will work right. They’ll sell dozens of these things- I’m tellin ya.
They still think it’s about hardware.
I’m waiting for one of these companies to really “innovate” and just break a net book or laptop in half and hide the keyboard behind the monitor and make it a slide out keyboard so they can brag about this “feature” not available on the iPad.
“MacDailyNews Take: Android’s share of the mobile-phone market has not surpassed Apple’s. Period.”
And even if it became true, so what? A bunch of fragmented and incompatible versions of the free OS “Android” running in multiple cheapo phones by multiple carriers — an irrelevant number, if there ever was one.
Good… market dilution and confusion. All the better to drive people to Apple, which is the best, safest choice.
I find it ironic that as much bitching as MDN does about Flash, my browser just completely locked up and froze because of a stupid Flash ad on this website (slow script error).
Put your money where your mouth is MDN and ban Flash-based ads.
This is gonna be FUN…
“The unit, a direct rival to the iPad, will be available in 10-inch and 12-inch versions starting at US$399. The cheapest iPad on the market, with only 16 gigabyte storage, no 3G, and very limited specifications, starts at $499, so the one real player in the market so far could soon face very intense competition.”
ROTFLMAO!
Yeah, because the “stuff it with a few extra features and knock a hundred bucks off the price” strategy worked so well for all those iPod and iPhone “killers”, didn’t it?!?
Google is catching up fast
Google will never catch up, not unless somehow Android apps start to be made at a much higher rate than iPhone OS apps. And really, does anyone see any chance of that happening any time soon? You can’t catch up with somebody unless you’re going faster than him!
57% of Android’s apps are free compared with only 25% of Apple’s
Kudos to Dirty Pierre le Punk for pointing out how meaningless this statistic is. 25% of Apple’s apps (that would currently be around 52,000) is not much smaller than the size of Android’s entire catalog.
Y’know, MDN gets a lot of sh*t on the net for being frothing-mouth paranoid when it comes to criticism of Apple. But c’mon — only an idiot or a fanatical Apple-hater could fail to see the distortions and outright lies in this article.
I look forward to seeing each and every one of these iPad-killers fall flat on their faces, the same as all the iPod and iPhone killers did.
——RM
These ppl r all freaking delusional. Period.
It’s just sad.
AssesTek’s “Eee Pad” is not promised until some unspecified date in 2010. If that’s the best example for a Windows 7 -based tablet that will “challenge” iPad, give it up now. HP tried and gave up (once Apple reset the expectations for tablets) and bought Palm to try again with WebOS.