We don’t envy any CIOs trying to figure out where to put their company pounds and Euros vis-à-vis corporate tablet-based computing. It’s getting to be a very busy area, which is good in the sense that it shows there is a market beyond the Apple iPad only.
But that same dynamic means it’s going to be an area where there is a real danger you could commit to a platform only to see your supplier dip out of the market and you facing some real questions about porting and lock-in.
This was one of the most thought-provoking nuggets from last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where the great, the good and the just very sharp gathered to sift the runes on the next developments in all things mobile and hand-held.
Our source is an interview with the VP product development at US carrier Sprint Nextel, who told the press that, "You’ll probably have a good dozen players by the end of this year – and then in two years you’ll probably see just five really playing in the space."
In other words, look for as many as six or seven players folding their cards. So you have to look at a landscape being shaped beyond Apple and see who’s real and who’s playing me-too without enough commitment to R&D and marketing to get a real piece of the action.
And no prizes for guessing this is one race that Microsoft isn’t even in – with iPad as it stands racking up 75% of all tablets sold in the last three months of 2010 (equals peak, Xmas/Q4), with rivals based on Google’s Android making up nearly all the rest, 22%, with also-rans at the balancing 3% (source: market watchers Strategy Analytics).
Taking Sprint itself as a distributor as a starting point, it’s offering the tablet version of BlackBerry, of course, in the shape of RIM’s PlayBook and the Samsung Electronics Galaxy Tab (and Android-based device).
Sprint was dropping hints at the show that it will use what it calls its 4G network as the have-to-have basis for a third addition to this portfolio, trying to tempt users with allegedly faster Web browsing and video downloads.
A brand like Samsung is really a consumer electronics one tout court. HP is also in this market and seems a more serious bidder for business accounts with its Palm software-based TouchPad, and Dell has said it’ll put out a Windows 7 based device later this year.
But will any of these, or even the ‘Xoom’ from Motorola (Android) and any of a bunch of others, make real headway? The issue is, what do users want – a phone on a bigger screen or something that tries a bit harder to use the form factor in an innovative way?
(Though patently there’s room for both; one wonders if some phones aren’t already the cellular version of Word, with users just sticking to the 10% of the functionality they learned years back and never bother learning the rest as they hop to new devices.)
We suspect the answer will be market momentum, frankly – which would leave Apple as dominant player facing some kind of Android-based second player with RIM still in there, if for nothing else because of the BlackBerry heritage. But that’s guesswork – and if you know the future of the tablet market better, tell us all so we can invest in the stock and get rich quick.
Tablets are definitely here – but the next couple of years will be very bumpy for some contenders, it seems.
