“People don’t have tablet fever; it seems they simply have a mania for iPads,” Ian Sherr reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“The latest evidence: Hewlett-Packard Co. is dropping the price of its TouchPad tablet by 20% little more than a month after it hit stores, as the computer giant tries to goose sales of its answer to Apple Inc.’s iPad,” Sherr reports. “Rivals have been routed so far. Motorola cut the price of its Xoom tablet after its February launch, released a cheaper model and warned shipments will decline this quarter. RIM’s PlayBook was delayed until April and still isn’t being offered for sale by the two biggest U.S. wireless carriers. Samsung Electronics Co., which was the quickest to market an iPad rival and has shipped millions of tablets based on Google Inc.’s Android software, is now embroiled in a patent dispute with Apple that threatens sales…”
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Sherr reports, “One sign of Apple’s dominance: Rivals discuss how many tablets they are shipping, but don’t disclose how many units are actually being purchased by customers… As some industry watchers put it: There are more iPads rival tablets sitting in warehouses and stores than current demand for those products, and that’s prompting manufacturers to cut prices to move inventory… Analysts say H-P is now conceding the obvious: consumers won’t pay the same price for an imitator, even a well-appointed one, as they will for the original. That has left the market for tablets split in two. ‘There’s an iPad market,’ said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, ‘and then there’s everyone else.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And, once certain people have an iPad, and get a load of iCloud in action, they just might decide they want to stop settling for fake iPhones, too.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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