Yesterday, I was in India Telecom exhibition in Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, and was surprised to see few unknown companies from China & Taiwan, which are manufacturing Tablets on Android operating system. On enquiring from the Stand of Taiwan Telecom, I was given to understand that there are lot of manufacturers of tablets in Taiwan and China. How many of them will be successful, only the coming time will come.
Most of these manufacturers are producing their tablets as OEM suppliers to leading companies. As per the news appearing in a Taiwanese website, Barnes & Noble have so far taken delivery of one million units of Nook Tablet PCs from OEM production partners in Taiwan – Inventec. Inventec suffered a setback after Hewlett-Packard (HP) decided to discontinue the production of WebOS based TouchPad tablets, which were sourced from them. But this loss of business was adjusted by overwhelming success of Nook tablets in US.
There are reports of other reputed tablets falling in this competitive market. This week, Dell discontinued its Streak 7 tablet, after the death of the Streak 5 in August due to poor sales. Last week, Research in Motion said it would write $485 million loss related to poor sales of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. A financial analyst estimated that RIM had 1.4 million unsold BlackBerry tablets left in its inventory. Then there is Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad tablet,which is on WebOS software, which was pulled off shelves after 48 days, followed by a desperate sale of the device for just $ 99, down from $500. The fate of the TouchPad is uncertain.
But the story of the tablet has brighter side also. Kindle Fire by Amazon.com and Nook tablet by Barnes & Noble, have sold beyond expectations of its suppliers and the main reason for their success is that Kindle Fire customers can download e-books, apps and movies from Amazon, and Nook Tablet customers can grab media from Barnes & Noble’s digital store.
And authority on tablet is iPad, which is successful because of the iTunes store, which offers applications, books, games, music, movies and more. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is also successful because of its Android OS and Android market. This is the only tablet, which is giving tough competition to Apple iPad.
Interesting times ahead as more and more cheap tablets are round the corner. As covered by us day before yesterday, Novo 7 tablet for US$ 99, has been launched in China, which is the first tablet on Android 4.0 OS. In the coming days, the prices are expected to crash further, and some more tablets will also crash out from the market.
