Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang gave his analysis of the Android tablet market in a recent interview with CNet. As far as he’s concerned, it’s everyone’s fault except Nvidia’s.
[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]Nvidia makes the Tegra 2 chip used in the new breed of Android-based tablets running Android “Honeycomb,” including Motorola’s Xoom and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1.
“It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise at retail problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem,” he said, for starters.
Add to that a pricing issue, as most entry level tablets include cell data connectivity when Apple’s product has Wi-Fi only, and what Huang calls a “software richness of content problem.”
In other words, it’s everyone and everything’s fault but the silicon – the part that Nvidia is responsible for. But benchmarks posted since the iPad 2’s release show even that isn’t that impressive stacked up against Apple’s new hardware.
Fear not, though. Nvidia’s got new Tegra hardware waiting in the wings, due out later this year: a quad-core Tegra design that will blow the doors off what’s available today.
Just in time to make all of the Android tablets rushing to market right now obsolete, of course.
Also worth noting that Apple isn’t standing still, as evidenced by the iPad 2.
Huang has a point, though, and that’s that the Android tablet business seems to be having a terrifically hard time getting its act together. Consumers aren’t responding to ads, don’t understand how the products differ, and don’t particularly care about what’s available – unless it’s from Apple, which continues to crank out iPad 2s as fast as they can sell them.
Huang expresses optimism about the direction of the Android tablet market, and he has reason to be upbeat. Today’s products are decidedly better than what’s come before, and tomorrow’s will be better still.
Android tablet makers are still at a deficit, though, because it’s still very much about them versus Apple. And with a number of different competing products, establishing meaningful signal through that noise will become increasingly difficult as the market crowds with more and more products from more companies.