“More players have apparently decided to postpone the launch of tablet PCs due to concerns of the prospects of the industry and the possible shortage of key components caused by the Japan earthquakes, according to industry sources,” Monica Chen, Yenting Chen, and Steve Shen report for DigiTimes.
“Sales of Xoom tablet PCs have been lower than expected, said sources at Taiwan’s notebook makers, citing brand image, pricing, insufficient applications and the unstable performance of Android 3.0 as reasons for the doldrums,” Chen, Chen, and Shen report. “With Google unable to offer sufficient support to cooperation partners at present, many players have decided to delay the launch of Android 3.0 tablet PCs, the sources added.”
Chen, Chen, and Shen report, “Asustek Computer reportedly has postponed the launch dates of its Android 3.0 16GB and 32GB Eee Pad Transformer tablets… [and] HTC has also intended to postpone the date set for volume production of its Flyer tablet PCs…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bloodbath.
Fractious!
Duh. That is a no brainer.
there will be those who buy these tablets, not because they are better than Apple offerings, but because they are not Apple products. SAD.
My sister in law is one of those. Will cite the lack of a SD card slot as one of the reasons. She did consider an iPhone recently and I found her a SD carder reader adaptor that would work for her. But my guess is that she went for an android phone.
She bought my wife a Sony E-reader book. Piece of crap. Couldn’t read it in the dark because there is no backlight and took forever to get it to charge because the USB would register properly.
apparently not many are. that’s the problem. they are not buying netbooks either. the measurement of success in this NEW post-PC market cannot be based on the metrics of the old-PC market. things like marketshare and partner slathering are less relevant and sometimes downright misleading. scale and margins have been redefined by apple unfettered by anyone else’s definitions or lack of imagination.
it must be real karma for SJ to watch all these former competitors become leg weary skating to where the puck was. this is what all the old-PC companies are doing. it will take someone who is not them to challenge apple. what makes apple the leader today is they haven’t thought and acted like an old-PC company for at least 10 years.
apple has figured out that the way you stop worrying about other people copying your success is to never rest and let them copying your current generation -2. that is what is happening with the tablet market.
Gee, what a surprise! MDN and the Mac people on this forum anticipated this very outcome a long time ago. Don’t count your vapor tablets until they sell.
Android-based tablets may very well end up being viable competitor to the iOS iPad(?) at some point in the future. After all, they have had the blueprint for success since the original iPhone was released. But it seems clear that we have not yet reached that point. iOS rules!
I think you’re actually going to see much better competition from HP and webOS than from Android. Google just can’t get its act together. When you’ve never released a product from beta, it’s hard to put together a good OS.
Integrated (control both the hardware and software) vs. modular (different companies do the hardware and the software) is an issue that Horace Dediu at asymco. com has discussed repeatedly.
Those who control both like Apple are the more likely to win. So that includes HPalm and maybe even RIM if they ever get it together. It might have applied to Nokia, but now that they’ve joined up with MS, they are more likely to fail.
any announcement about a future product is staged by the WS SHYSTERS in their relentlessmanipulation of apple stock. The competition get a weird sense of contentment by the fact that they helped bring down apple’s market value by a couple billion. The boys from Nebraska are doing high-fives shorting the long derivatives of apple.
I will not be surprised if the cretin from GS ups his projectionsinthe days before earnings announcement.
Fractacular!
More than one demotivation poster at despairdotcom applies to this rumor. Delusions seems fitting.
Been reading the PlayBook reviews. Phew!
The comments are deliciously misguided – wincing defense of an obvious failure.
“… due to concerns of the prospects… and the possible shortage of key components caused by the Japan earthquake”…
LMAO… I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Motorola boardroom as the head-up-their-arse execs are trying to explain how they are getting whooped by the Apple. At this point, it would have been better for Motorola if their manufacturing plant for the Xoom had been at the epicenter of the quake. At least then, their excuses might have a small grain of validity!!
Convenient excuses to let them delay the humiliation that will come when their current tablet is released?
Deja Vu…
And next year at the CES they’ll be showing their 2012 tablets… Of course they won’t give any pricing or shipping dates information…
Where’s the ™ on AppLack?
That would be a great trademark! Then Apple could simply use the famous AFLAC (the insurance company) duck to make hilarious commercials poking fun at their “appless” competitors.
Gilbert Gottfried is available for spokesman.
iPad is the medicine we need. Vapor tablets do not even equal placebos.
The news source is the Taiwanese law firm of Chen, Chen, and Shen.
No offense to the Chens but they sound like a chain of fools…
Why no description of AppLack? What the hell is it?
No Apps available = Applack
But you knew that or you’re stupid, one or the other.
Chill! Binky is probably new on MDN…
Eric T. Mole is Gaagle’s former CEO, you know, the creepy guy
Monkey Boy is M$ CEO, although many think he secretly works for Apple
Binky, Isn’t it obvious to you? If not just post and I will explain.
I have been saying all along in these comments that the myth of Android owning more market share is based on the myth of Android. There is no Android. There is Moto, Samsung, Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba, etc. Whatever Android donates to them as an underpinning, (awful as it really is) is just that, the underpinning of an OS. If this is the measure of market share, that Android is the sous chef software to all of these variations, measure the variations web share and compare each to iOS, or look at OSX as the underpinning of iOS and measure Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPod touches, Apple TVs to Android. The picture becomes quite a different one regarding meaningless market share. Google is making nada on Android. Apple is cleaning up on OSX/iOS. Android phone profit margins are thin and will get thinner as “market share” builds. Apple will just skim the profit. We don’t look at WebKit Market share of browsers, why “Android” market share of mobile OS? All of this smells of headlines, market manipulation, false competition. We comment upon it and Apple doesn’t give a Rat’s Ass. They make the money. Wall Street bandits use this to manipulate prices, but the steamroller rolls over them, eventually, as well. The iPad is the revolutionary and magical device Steve Jobs touted it to be. Microsoft down, Google down, today Apple (the beneficiary of the fall of those two) is down. What crap. In the end when the competition catches up, Apple will be somewhere else, with their “walled garden” selling tickets for admission and the public eager to spend their dollars for hardware/software/ecosystem/innovation/magic
Well said.
Though I do believe that Google is seeing (at least) income because of Android, through the ads they are able to host on maps, gmail, etc. Not to mention being the (generally) default search engine on android.
Otherwise, spot-on. Great contribution to the thread.
But Google is the default search engine on iPhones, iPod touches and iPads as well. All Google did was piss Apple off (and a lot of Apple faithful), and waste resources developing Android when it should have worked harder to integrate with the iPhone and get used in more ways. After all, iPhone users are far more likely to make purchases from ads than Android users.
I’m with you Michael!
Just bought my 77 year old mom an iPad 2 and she loves it! Guess I’ll have to pay someone to pickup the shitty-Toshiba she used 3 times in the last 4 years.
This is what makes it revolutionary, elder people can join the digital age without fear of mistakes, error, messages and viruses. It just works, is intuitive and fun
Google’s new philosophy (as shown by execs recent comments after earnings that they like iPhone) ?
:
” the g#d d@mn OEMS want to load Bing, yahoo and Baidu on Android devices. Better let iOS thrive, be nice to S.Jobs and let Google be iOS default.”
(Google is also now withholding Honeycomb builds except to ‘select’ manufacturers. Guess they don’t want it be hijacked to become ‘Baidu Machines’ like chinese Android phones )
that gives some context to the OEMS complaint: “With Google unable to offer sufficient support to cooperation partners at present,”
Larry Page ; “sh@t you want us to cooperate so you can load Baidu on it?”
Android is giving Google a lot of headaches and not a lot of money: less than a billion a year vs 50 billion or more for apple mobile.
Well I don’t blame a manufacturer for waiting on HoneyComb.
I look at it this way, Android was never intended to run on a tablet to begin with.
Google had 2 operating systems going and they were intended for 2 different purposes.
You had Android for Mobile phones, and it was not until 2.2 Froyo and 2.3 Gingerbread that it really hit a stride and become a solid contender.
Then there was Chrome, which was more of an experimental OS. I think eventually Google planned to use Chrome to invade the desktop and hand MS their own @ss.
So you have some manufacturers who wanted to jump on the “tablet craze” and Android was available. They slammed it on some tablets and shipped it.
This put Google in a position of re-evaluating things.
Realizing that the ‘home desktop’ might well change in the next few years (i.e: become much smaller) they were not sure where to go with Chrome and then they had the issue of companies already shipping Android on tablets.
So they decide to make a tablet optimized version of Android. Awesome except they only now shipped the first version and the apps are not there. Add to that but its basically V1 of “Android for tablets” so I don’t expect it to be ready for prime time.
I would not expect Android to be a solid Tablet OS until at least the next release or possibly the one after that. If it follows the same road that Android took to becoming a strong mobile OS on phones.
Chrome? Man that may never see the light of day outside of google as far as mainstream usage goes.
I’d love to have an Android tablet that ran apps that took advantage of the resolution and were feature complete. That would rock as I love Android on my phone.
However I’m going to wait a year or two and see what comes to market and in the meantime I have no regrets about my soon to be purchase of the best ‘tablet’ out there right now… the iPad…
The thing is that Google, just like everybody else is attempting to emulate Apple. Here is the catch. You can only copy what Apple already did. With the iPad, it caught everybody off guard. The initial sentiment was that it would fail. Guess what, it did not and it rocks and nobody can do anything to compete.
Thanks for all the responses to my query on AppLack. I’ve been thoroughly educated (and bitch-slapped by a few morons).
AND don’t forget the kids. The young’ns love the iPad. The greatest teaching aid and entertainment device in history.
AT LAST! A few companies got the clue that Android and cruddy hardware design ≠ profits. They equal losses.
Sorry you’re ticked off at Apple for creating the market, but Apple created the market! Sorry you can’t come up with comparable hardware and software, but you can’t come up with comparable hardware and software!
Apple rules the market until such time as you can come up with something that actually COMPETES with Apple! Get to it! Competition is great!
Oh and Google!
You HAVE to provide app security! There is no way around it! This is the 21st century! No security = no buy it! No one wants Trojan horse apps on their Android device? GET IT?!