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.
I saw this situation around the time of Apple’s introducing third-party sdks. It was the elegance and integration of components of the hardware, OS, software, human interface guidelines, curated app store, ban on Flash, brick and mortar retail chain, etc.–all of which equated to Apple’s “ecosystem”.
How could any competitor hope to compete with that, or how could any competitor hope to build anything similar in a short amount of time when Apple had been working on the components for decades?
So let them fumble around and build their castles down the beach somewhere. As long as Apple keeps on building on its successes, there will be little, if any, threat.
And of course the processor has nothing to do with the way Flash on Android tablets wear the battery down so fast? Yeah, NVidia has no part of the problem in their corner.
The greatest things tech geeks could have said about the iPad is “it’s just a giant iPhone/Touch but without the phone!” It was evident how much cache the iPhone had with consumers prior to the release of the iPad the iPad was bound to be a success because “it’s just a big iPhone!” In the consumers mind you equate it with iPhone it means you can’t go wrong! Apples greatest marketing is the consumer themselves and that’s what pisses off the fans of other platforms!
The underlying problem is they are just shipping a bag of parts, like a low-end PC. A tablet needs even more integration than a PC. By using such a different manufacturing process than Apple but saying their products are as good as an iPad they are just being disingenuous.
“even that isn’t that impressive stacked up against Apple’s new hardware”
Not that impressive? The iPad 2 hardware is *several* times faster than the Tegra 😀
http://www.tipb.com/2011/03/13/apple-a5-dual-cortex-a9-powervr-sgx-543mp2/