“If one of your company’s goals for 2011 was to introduce a tablet to complete with the iPad, you can expect to struggle,” Andy Ihnatko reports for The Chicago Sun-Times. “The second most powerful evidence of this happened just a minute ago, as I pulled out my iPad and keyboard here in my San Francisco hotel lobby to write this very same column. ‘Looks like you’re going to have to buy a new one of those,’ said an electrician as he passed by me on the way to his truck. ‘The new one’s coming out on the 11th.'”
“I didn’t tell him that I had attended the Apple iPad 2 press event that morning,” Ihnatko reports. “No, sometime in the previous hour or two, this random stranger had heard about the new version of the iPad … and he remembered the ship date. That’s how successful Apple’s been. Consumers aren’t just aware of the iPad … they’re actually excited about it.”
Ihnatko reports, “And if you are indeed one of those makers of an upcoming competing tablet, Apple used their time at the Yerba Buena Center to deliver a clear message to you: Just go home. From nearly the moment that Steve Jobs took the stage to the end, he seemed to be saying ‘We’d be concerned about competition if anybody were actually prepared to compete with us.’ … You kind of have to hold the iPad 2 to really get the redesign. It’s thinner by a third, plus its edges taper to a thin line of metal. It’s almost inconceivable that this thing you’re holding is a multicore tablet computer. The Xoom tablet is trim, light, and very pretty, but when you place it next to the iPad 2, it looks as though it was designed and built by angry Soviet prison labor…”
Read more in the enjoyable full article – recommended – here.