Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Invincible iPad

How do you make a tablet that can compete with the iPad? Well, one way is to look at its current competition, and then draw conclusions based on their impending failure.

  • The Samsung Tab, which loses because it’s the wrong size, is merely an upscaled phone OS with a discombobulated UI, and sits on a platform with a utilitarian interface that nobody really loves.
  • The Motorola Xoom (and any upcoming Honeycomb tablet, really), which is about the right size but replaces an upscaled OS with an empty OS, with an interface that still nobody really loves.
  • The BlackBerry Playbook, which is discombobulated in every single way possible, from the haphazard development platform to the wrong device sizing to the inability to work properly without a BlackBerry phone.

There are two tablets that actually might find a place in the world: the Nook and the TouchPad. The Nook is more of a large handheld than a tablet, though - you won’t stand this up on the desk and hook up a keyboard to take notes, for example. It does have a controlled and curated (if not well curated) platform, though, and the hook to get people to use it is the eBook collection, which gets people to buy without relying on its barren app store like its Honeycomb counterparts. It is also quite cheap, at half the iPad’s price. I wouldn’t suggest getting it over an iPad, but for those roles where a 7-inch screen works as well as a 10-inch it may well carve out a niche.

The TouchPad is probably the best iPad competitor, but right off the bat it’s going to struggle due to a weak app store. Unlike the Nook, the TouchPad tries to fill the same role as the iPad does, and therefore it has to be better than the iPad at at least something. At first glance the UI pattern and the notification scheme really are better. I’ll come right out and say that the iPad’s portrait sidebar-popover scheme is very annoying, though maybe “cleaner” than the TouchPad’s way. However, if there’s no apps to take advantage of it, then this is of little benefit, and Apple has such a tightly integrated and well-performing system that there are a lot of places that WebOS could have lower quality than iOS.

I think the TouchPad is going to need to use dollars to entice people to it. It could easily be considered equal to the iPad aside from the app count, and giving buyers $100 should be enough to at least make some users (particularly the ones that don’t do much) take the risk. Probably HP will lose money on the deal, but if they want to really build a platform, they need users more than profits. The one difference between HP and Motorola & pre-HP Palm is that HP can take a price hit if it needs to. I think it needs to. If it doesn’t, then it won’t be much more successful than a Honeycomb tablet.

So, to actually get to the point: these are all of the tablets that Apple has to worry about, and the only way any of them can even compete is by slashing prices or becoming something the iPad is not. The iPad has nailed it: the hardware is perfect unless you absolutely need hi-def cameras, and the OS, while having a few UI flaws, is also amazing in the performance department. All the Nook can hope for is that there are lots of cheap people who think they need a smaller tablet, and the TouchPad is banking on being absolutely perfect in every category it can, because it fills the exact same role the iPad does. Godspeed to the HP team with that, but I won’t place my bets on them.

Is there anything that could compete toe-to-toe with the iPad? One idea: a tablet with an (optional) pen input. Oh, certainly, pens are horrible for navigating interfaces or doing anything other than graphical input, but they sure as hell beat fingerpainting on the iPad when you do need graphical input. This is rare enough, however, that I don’t think it’ll drive a lot of sales.

What else? Sign deals with video content providers to provide lots of free or exclusive content to watch or listen to. I would rather they put stuff on the iPad, but I’m throwing options out there.

So, let’s take this theoretical absolutely-perfect TouchPad, add pen input and lots of free TV. Keep it at the same price. Throw it at the iPad… and it still wins because it has way more apps, and good apps, and the TouchPad can’t do 50% of the things you use the iPad for. There’s just no options out there that are really compelling other than dropping the price or not being a tablet.

Bottom line: the iPad is invincible. You just can’t come up with a scenario where you would want anything other than an iPad (if you want a tablet at all) for $500. Shocking, I know, but I figure it’s my civic duty to dissuade people from thinking there’s any point in buying anything else.