2011 – Tablet competition heating up for second position?

Recently quite a few tablets are announced at CES 2011 and most of the predictions are that we will see these tablets in consumer’s hands this year. This reminds me the CES 2011 when everyone was expecting a tablet from Apple and a number of companies announced their own plans for tablets in 2010. Nothing materialised really in 2010 but 2011 is poised to be a different year because of advances of technology and also a viable market for tablets which is currently dominated by Apple. With a keen interest in tablets I want to know how the market will shape up when all these tablets are launched.

I wrote a few months back that why iPad will be a winner regardless of the emerging competition. That prediction was based upon Apple’s first mover advantage, product development theory and brand recognition. Lets see whether Apple can whether this new competition?

More exciting challengers to iPad are Motorola Xoom, Blackberry Playbook and Toshiba Tablet. There are also some more tablets from Samsung, Asus, MSI etc which will be running Windows 7 as well as a HP tablet which will be running on WebOS. Out of these Motorola, Toshiba and Blackberry’s offerings have gathered a lot of positive press. Blackberry has a considerable market in smart phones and with the launch of its app store last year, it has offered its customers a good channel to purchase applications. Motorola and Toshiba will be relying on the strengths of Android and its app store. Google which develops Android is poised to launch version 3.0 (honeycomb) of Android in the first quarter of this year and is also rapidly increasing the capabilities of its app store.

All of these companies has taken a note of Apple’s success in developing an ecosystem of its products and various channels such as app store which has become a key winning factor. This is why Google, Blackberry, Nokia and Microsoft has launched their own app stores for smart phones and are now extending those to tablets.

iPad is at the crucial stage of its life cycle and I believe as the market is ready to be exploded in this segment, iPad has all the chance to move from early adaptors to the mainstream users with the launch of its iPad 2 later this year. I believe iPad will still dominate the market because its designers and developers has the most experience in the market and they will be able to offer the most polished experience to users. No doubt the companies such as Blackberry, Motorola, Toshiba, Microsoft all will be offering very powerful tablets, but the hardware specifications will not be the only factor in success. In order to reach to the mass market beyond techies they need to offer a simple and intuitive experience and that is where I think Apple will dominate.

I think the competition will be fierce in tablet market but that competition will be for the second position and iPad will keep its domination by just adding enough muscles to it iPad and offering more features.