Posts Tagged ‘Motorola’

Computex Taipei 2011 draws tablet watchers and stake holders

Monday, May 30th, 2011

The 5-day annual trade show in Taipei will see more tablet models based on Google’s Android and a preview of Microsoft’s next Windows platform for tablets – one year after Apple’s game changing iPads grab the lion’s share of the tablet market.

COMPUTEX Taipei, or Taipei International Information Technology Show (台北國際電腦展), will be held from May 31 to June 4, 2011 in Taipei. Taiwan based Acer and Asustek had first showed off their low-cost but trend-setting netbooks at the Computex in 2007 and 2008.

Investors and analysts will be watching to see if new Android based tablets can challenge Apple’s iPad. Non-iPad tablet competitors are expected to halve Apple’s 100 percent dominance of the tablet market to 50 percent next year, iSuppli predicted on April 21. The iPad had cordoned off the entire tablet market when it was first launched in June last year because of the absence of competitors.

Computex Taipei 2011 from May 31 to June 4, 2011

Computex Taipei 2011 from May 31 to June 4, 2011.

Both Google and Microsoft will send executives to the event to brief the media on their plans. Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, and ARM, whose chip designs are licensed by Qualcomm and Nvidia to power tablets, will also be vying for tablet manufacturers to select their chips.

Global shipments of tablets will increase almost twelve times to 215 million units in 2015 from 17 million last year, Toni Sacconaghi, a New York-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., wrote in a May 26 report.

Computer sales growth will be reduced by 2 percent annually between 2010 and 2015, Sacconaghi wrote, because fifteen percent of all tablets will cannibalize the sale of consumer PCs.

Bloomberg reports that Microsoft will “preview its operating system designed for tablets this week, using hardware with ARM-based chips”. The current Windows 7 operating system from Microsoft is not compatible with the ARM chips used in tablets from manufacturers such as Samsung and Motorola.

BlackBerry PlayBook’s first day sales beats Motorola’s Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Friday, April 22nd, 2011
First day sales of the newly launched BlackBerry PlayBook from RIM was said to reach 50,000 on April 19. RIM is expected to sell 500,000 of the 7 inch tablets in its first quarter ending in May.

BlackBerry PlayBook from RIMThe first day sales number of 50,000 includes pre-sales and was estimated by an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. This appears to surpass the equivalent first day sales for Motorola’s Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Analyst Mike Abramsky’s staff checked 70 retails stores and found 11% of the locations that stocked the device had sold out, according to Matt Hamblen from Computerworld.

This may come as a surprise to many observers in view of the negative reviews that have bombarded Research In Motion (RIM) over the launch of the tablet computer.

Punters feel the software for the PlayBook was not ready yet because native support for email, contact and calendar apps were not available. Such support may only be provided as an over the air update in summer.

In the meantime, only those who own a BlackBerry smartphone can enable the PlayBook to access these basic apps via a Bluetooth connection. The tablet is only available in WiFi configuration with 3G available only in summer.

It is still too early to tell whether the PlayBook will be able to grab any market share from a tablet market seeing an influx of competitors to Apple’s iPad.

93% of 4.5 million tablets sold in 2010Q3 were iPads

Friday, February 25th, 2011

This is hardly surprising since the iPad has been the only tablet around for most of last year, until Samsung’s Galaxy Tab.

ABI ResearchAccording to data from ABI Research, of the approximately 4.5 million tablets sold in the third quarter of 2010, about 93 percent were Apple iPads.

The original iPad went on sale on 3 April 2010. Reports anticipate the announcement of the iPad 2 next week on 2 Mar 2011.

Samsung’s well-received Android-based Galaxy Tab was launched late last year, while Motorola’s Xoom Android-based tablet became available yesterday. Research In Motion plans to release four versions of its Playbook this year.

iPad 2 launch on 2 Mar?

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

Have you received the invitation from Apple?

Apple's invitation for the 2 March event

Apple emailed the invitation to a media event in San Francisco that showed a calendar page with the date 2 March and the top right corner of the page peeling back to reveal an iPad underneath. The peek-a-boo iPad suggests that Apple may unveil its new version of the iPad during the event.

Earlier reports from Taiwan-based Yuanta Securities had surmised that the iPad launch might be delayed to June this year because of production bottlenecks at the China production line of Hon Hai – Apple’s Taipei-based contract manufacturer.

Will the iPad 2 be announced on 2 Mar?Indulging in my own bit of speculation, both schools of thought may not be untrue. We might actuallly see an iPad announcement on March 2 followed by the taking of orders, with deliveries only materialising in June, probably staged out based on country.

What with the legion of Android tablets being unveiled by the day, with specs that trounce the year old iPad, any delay in unveiling the upgraded specs of iPad 2 could create a negative impression in people that the iPad is inferior to Android tablets.

The announcement of iPad2 with all the specs that has been rumoured to ship with it should maintain its aura of invincibility that over challengers.

Apple certainly won’t want to announce the iPad 2 in June only to have people yawn at its specs, since by then it may already have been featured on the Android tablets out there.

Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy Tab was launched last year and was well-received. Motorola’s Xoom Android-based tablet goes on sale today, while Research In Motion plans to release four versions of its Playbook this year.

The original iPad went on sale on April 3. Announcing the iPad 2 on March would mean that it will follow an annual cycle of updates like the iPhone and iPod.