“Most industry watchers have (finally) come to the conclusion that smaller, low cost tablets are taking over the industry,” Sameer Singh writes for Tech-Thoughts. “This would seem counter intuitive to our previous smartphone analysis, which showed that larger screen devices and low cost devices catered to two different segments.”
“The difference is that computing is the “default” use case for any tablet, across segments (as opposed to the computing vs. communication dichotomy we saw in smartphones),” Singh writes. ” A better way to segment the market would be by specific computing use cases.”
Singh writes, “The key point to understand here is that most of today’s tablets ranging from the 9.7″ iPad to low-end 7-inch tablets cater to [the content consumption vs. productivity] segment. As products improved and the set of tasks performed remained the same, consumers naturally began gravitating to lower priced tablets. This was the primary reason behind the cannibalization and collapse of 9.7″ iPad shipments. An argument could be made that 7-inch tablets were also easier to use, but I believe that was a secondary factor.”
Read more in the full article here.