“The Black Friday promotional support for tablets seems notably weak – Amazon’s price aggression may have been the final nail in the coffin of several major tablet projects,” Tero Kuittinen writes for Forbes.
“Old school phone vendors like Motorola, Samsung, HTC and RIM are staring at an early death of their tablet projects as Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble basically split the market,” Kuittinen writes. “Tablets were supposed to be the new gadget category that could have helped Best Buy, Target, Walmart and others to create a vibrant new consumer electronics category as video game consoles, GPS devices and laptops are weak this winter.”
Kuittinen writes, “Instead, the tablets may now be a category that siphons off consumer spending to Apple stores, Amazon website and B&N bookstores… The prominent ads for Kindle devices on Amazon website combined with strong television ads for iPad and Nook mean that much of the oxygen in the category are consumed by one high-end and two low-end devices, at the very extremes of the price spectrum… This could accelerate the erosion of Blackberry devices radically. The Playbook tablet range did not have to be a huge success, but if it dies entirely, it blows a hole in the corporate viability of the Blackberry handset ecosystem. The current consensus projections for RIMM assume that corporations won’t start ripping out RIM’s servers in 2012. That is no longer a given as many corporations need a smartphone/tablet mix for their enterprise device mix. The Amazon tablet is hardly a good fit for enterprises – but if it manages to kill off tablets like Playbook in the consumer market, it leaves the entire corporate tablet market wide open for Apple.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David E.” for the heads up.]