A sea of tablets at CES, but no iPad-killer

Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha shows the company's new Xoom tablet at the Verizon keynote address on the opening day of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas January 6, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking

By Gabriel Madway

LAS VEGAS | Fri Jan 7, 2011 4:53pm EST

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - It was easier to find a tablet this week in Las Vegas than a taxi.

Rivals determined to prevent Apple Inc from dominating the tablet market the way it did with digital music players unleashed a tidal wave of touchscreen devices at the Consumer Electronics Show.

This year may well produce a viable competitor to Apple's iPad. But CES only served to underscore the challenge they face.

Of the slew of tablets on view at CES, devices from Motorola and Research in Motion were standouts. But none rose to iPad-killer status, analysts said. Some, lazier vendors seemed to use the show as a whiteboard to sketch out half-baked ideas.

Rich Beyer, chief executive of Freescale Semiconductor, which makes chips for tablets, said in an interview ahead of CES that Apple's rivals are still testing the market.

"I think a lot of people are hoping that this market is not going to be like Apple and the MP3 market."

Rivals are already playing catch-up, after Apple moved assertively to define the tablet market, sacrificing its precious margin profile to price the iPad at $500.

There is undoubtedly an opportunity for other tablets, particularly with different screen sizes and in the corporate market, where Apple has not traditionally been very successful. And the sheer ubiquity of tablets based on Google's Android software makes that the platform that Apple cannot ignore.

The tablet segment is expected to more than triple to 50 million units in 2011, with Apple seen as by far the dominant vendor.

Despite Apple's big head start, no one expects its competitors to stay away. Sony Corp said it hopes to become the world's second-largest vendor of tablet devices by 2012, but failed to show anything.

Paul-Henri Ferrand, head of consumer marketing for Dell, said: "Apple can't expect to have the tablet market to itself."

CORPORATE DEMAND

A host of manufacturers are producing tablets based on Android, which is free to license. But Android tablets will face the added challenge of not only competing against the iPad, but also one another.

"Android will be a key player in the tablet market but it will be hard for any single vendor to challenge Apple," said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.

Lenovo, LG Electronics and Asustek Computer were just a few of the companies showing off Android tablets at CES.

Sharp’s Galapagos tablets will have to adapt to survive the U.S.

Sharp’s Galapagos tablet may fall prey to Darwinian laws, if Sharp can’t shape it up in time for its stateside introduction.

Sharp will tell you the name for its latest Galapagos tablets comes from the Pacific isles of the same name, where Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest was forged: Organisms must adapt or die. It’s fitting, but probably not in the way the company imagined. Sharp’s Galapagos will have to morph into something almost unrecognizable from its current self to survive its transition to the United States in 2011 – especially in forest chirping with competitors ready to chomp the heads right off competitors.

The 5.5- and 10.8-inch tablets arrived in Japan just recently boasting a variety of distinct features. They use 16:9 aspect ratios in the screen, rather the the iPad-style 4:3. They run Linux instead of Android. They’re tuned to Sharp’s own XMDF file format, rather than ePub or other standard formats. And they don’t have 3G, just Wi-Fi.

Unfortunately, none of these traits seem particularly suited to surviving the harsh market for tablets that don’t have an Apple stamped on the back in the United States. The 16:9 aspect ratio has been tailored to paperbacks, but doesn’t fit well for magazines, which its color screen would seem to favor. The flavor of Linux installed isn’t standard, doesn’t have basic features like a Web browser, and crawls along at, appropriately enough, a tortoise’s pace. Pages literally take seconds to flip after dragging a finger across them. It has Sharp’s own e-book store, but no access to well-recognized U.S. giants like Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

The glimmer of hope for the fledgling species known as the Galapagos seems to be in the fact that just about nothing about these tablets has been finalized yet, short of the fact that they’re coming. At the end of Sharp’s press conference, Sharp execs refused to confirm the screen sizes, the operating system (it could still be Android), whether it would land 3G, and of course, the price.

May the best tablet win.

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