“It’s been a gloomy holiday season for tablet makers — unless, that is, you are Apple, Amazon or Barnes & Noble,” Brian X. Chen blogs for The New York Times.
“The stories of tablets hitting the market and failing to sell are piling up. This week, Dell discontinued its Streak 7 tablet, after the death of the Streak 5 in August due to poor sales. The move marks Dell’s departure from the tablet market in the United States, at least for now,” Chen reports. “And last week, Research in Motion said it would take a $485 million write-down related to poor sales of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. A financial analyst estimated that RIM had 1.4 million unsold BlackBerry tablets left in its inventory. Then of course there is Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad tablet, which was pulled off shelves after 48 days, followed by a fire sale of the device for just $100, down from $500.”
“Why is it so hard to make a successful tablet? Companies are failing for the same reasons that a string of tablet devices flopped before the iPad came to market, says Sarah Rotman-Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research. Lack of content and capability are the key reasons,” Chen reports. “‘It’s the same story as it has been from the beginning,’ Ms. Rotman-Epps said. ‘They’re all trying to sell tablets as if they were PCs. Verizon marketed all these tablets with 4G and gigabytes of storage. What consumers care about is what they can do with the device.’
Chen reports, “Meanwhile, Apple made roughly 42 million of the 58 million tablets sold worldwide in 2011, according to estimates by Gartner, a market research firm… Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s tablet numbers are not shaping up to be nearly as big as Apple’s iPad sales, but all three devices can succeed on different scales, Ms. Rotman-Epps said.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Whit D.” for the heads up.]