“Android-derived brands like the Kindle Fire and the Nook will thrive in an iPad mini world — but devices based on a more pure version of Android will struggle,” Casey Newton writes for CNET.
“Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research, breaks it down like this. On the low-low end, where devices like the Nook Simple Touch sell for $99, device makers still have room to maneuver. Devices sold at that price are selling at cost or at a loss to the manufacturer, with that manufacturer hoping to eventually make money selling books, movies, music, games, and other services,” Newton writes. “Then there are the tablets that aim to challenge the iPad more directly: the Nexus 7, for example, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0. Both offer premium hardware targeted at the same sort of person who might now choose to purchase an iPad Mini. And it’s these tablets, Gillett argues, that could be in trouble.”
Newton writes, “Someone who buys a Kindle Fire knows she’s getting a lower-cost tablet that functions largely as a store… But in an iPad Mini world, a customer considering a midrange tablet will have higher expectations. And for now they may be expectations that the Googles and Samsungs of the world can’t satisfy.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]