Continuing from my previous post on the Indian Tablet Market. Two major events occurred which are related to tablet PC industry- Kapil Sibal unveiled Datawind's 'Akash' tablet at sub 2500 rupees, and within a day Steve Jobs, the man who gave a fresh life to tablets, passed away.
Many professionals today mistake Steve as the innovator of tablets - that is not true. Just like iPod was not the first mp3 player, iPad arrived a few years after tablets were first released. All the earlier devices failed miserably, and full credit to Steve to have had the guts to venture into this area, as well as make it a roaring success.
I think even other good tablet makers like samsung owe it to Steve for having revived the market and indirectly enabling their sales too.
Meanwhile I have bought my first tablet- an android 2.3 based iBall Slide - a value for money device with decent features at 14k rupees. The one reason I chose this over slightly lower priced competitors like Reliance Tab, Beetel Magiq, Mercury mTab, etc was the presence of USB Host - the ability to connect USB keyboard, mouse, pendrives, etc - which were otherwise found only in the 30k device range. Hopefully this device will meet all the needs till the products become more mature. The only one irritant in using it is that some websites still work with only Internet Explorer - which is not possible with android or iOS devices, and that's the only area where netbooks score.
Apart from Samsung Galaxy Tab, I think another device worth checking out is Asus Eee Pad, which at 29k priced bundled with keyboard dock and android honeycomb OS is hi end at much lower price than iPad.
Going at this rate, I think over a period of next 3-5 years, computing will move over to tablets entirely.
What a bold assessment that it will all be ipads in 3-5 yrs.... I so want to prove u wrong... These pads might are nothing but laptops without a hardware keyb... And why would u want keyboard access?... Go for a laptop instead...
ReplyDeleteThe soft keyboards are quite comfy as I found out recently - may not be the built in android keyboard, but there are loads of good soft keyboards installable.
ReplyDeleteI believe, for everything else except niche scientific uses & intensive software development, ppl would move over to tabs for their convenience - the market being split between apple and android. Try typing in portrait mode with your two hands on a soft keyboard on a 7" tab - and you will realize how simple it is.
Also, wanted to mention that the last 5-6 posts on this blog has been done from an android phone!
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