Steve Jobs gossips about Android and 7-inch tablets
Compact iPad competitors ultimately too close to the smartphone
Steve Jobs used the presentation of the current Apple quarterly figures to pull off the competition in the form of Android and seven-inch tablets. According to the company boss, the latter are too small and therefore "Dead on Arrival", ie already dead at the market launch. This announcement is tough, but according to analysts, it is not unfounded. "There will be users for whom a seven-inch tablet is enough. But the user experience will be more like a smartphone than a tablet," explains Carolina Milanesi, Research VP Mobile Devices at Gartner, in an interview with pressetext.
{jumi [plugins/content/jumi/newsgrafik.php]}
According to the analyst, further criticism of Android by Jobs, such as the increasing fragmentation even in the area of app markets, cannot be completely dismissed. The Apple boss also states that there were an average of 275.000 activations of iOS devices per day in the past fiscal quarter, which clearly puts Android in the shade.
Bigger is better
With the Galaxy Tab, one of the first serious iPad challengers is starting these days, with some very good reviews. "Samsung brings the better iPad" is the verdict of the Handelsblatt today, Tuesday. But Apple is unimpressed by such seven-inch devices. Jobs points out that the display of such a model is effectively not even half the size of the iPad. The compact devices are neither quite a smartphone nor a tablet. Gartner believes that this is exactly what seven-inch models could actually do.
"I can imagine that a user has both an iPad and an iPhone. This is not the case with the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab, the difference is not big enough," says Milanesi. If customers buy seven-inch tablets and mobile phones at all, the latter will probably be more of a cheap model, according to the analyst. In addition, Samsung's Tab uses Android like most iPad challengers so far - an operating system that, according to Google, is not really designed for tablets, as Jobs emphasizes.
Marketplace fragmentation
With Android, the tablets also face all the problems that the platform itself has. Steve Jobs points out that app developers have to optimize their programs for various Android versions and devices. He also emphasizes that in addition to the actual App Market for Android, there are more and more additional marketplaces, which makes it difficult for developers to sell. "He painted a very bad picture there. But there are actually problems, especially for small developers who cannot afford to create tons of different versions," says Milanesi. Google will probably get the existing problem under control with the further maturation of Android.
As far as the number of devices is concerned, the activation numbers mentioned by the Apple boss not only overshadow the 200.000 Android devices per day mentioned by Google CEO Eric Schmidts. On an annual average, Apple would also exceed Gartner's sales forecasts. However, the Apple boss is also referring to a quarter in which, thanks to the iPhone 4 launch, 14,1 million devices were sold, which is over 60 percent more than according to Gartner in the second quarter of 2010. In addition, there are also iPad and iPod touch iOS devices.(ck)
.