With new iPad, tablet wars have just begun
Apple launched its new iPad on March 7. With last minute rumors swirling around textured touchscreens and Siri integration, the release ultimately concluded to minor upgrades to the runaway hit that is the iPad 2. These upgrades included iPhone-like Retina Display screens, a separate GPU and CPU and a Photoshop competitor named iPhoto. With pre-orders sold out within hours on the Apple website, the new iPad is already a success. But what people don't notice is that how the tables have just turned for tablets. Apple's new iPad pricing follows its traditional discount policy: every new product iteration starts at the same price bracket its predecessor did, and the predecessor itself gets a significant discount while still on the market. The iPad 2 began at USD 499 (approx. Tk 40,000), but with the new iPad at this price, it gets slapped with a price tag of USD 399 (approx. Tk 32,000). If you were to compare tablets available at this price- the first Samsung Galaxy Tab, the BlackBerry PlayBook and the Acer Iconia A500- the iPad 2 trumps in terms of display, speeds, battery life and of course, content. The age-old argument that Android tablets are a boon for the low-end tablet market just became redundant with Apple positioning a premium product in the same price bracket for one and all to avail. Of course, not all is rosy in Appleland: the new iPad isn't close to revolutionary. Rather, it's evolutionary, in the same way that the iPhone 4S was to iPhone 4. iOS is steadily playing catch-up to Android in terms of secondary features and so all iDevices are mere progressors rather than disruptors of the markets that they created. Secondly, device manufacturers understand the Jobsian term, 'post-PC era' well. Take ASUS Transformer Prime tablet, for example. Without taking a leaf from Apple's book, the team at ASUS set out to create a tablet they would like to work with: one that eliminates netbooks and notebooks in everyday use and yet pays homage to its smartphone roots. The Prime doesn't skimp on hardware- it boasts the Nvidia Tegra 3 GPU to allow 3D gaming- and proved exceptional customer loyalty by releasing upgrades to Android v. 4.0 within weeks of the OS release. The keyboard-cum-battery dock gave the post-PC feel to the Prime. The greatest piece of evidence lies in this statement: people are willing to pay original prices for secondhand Primes. Pre-orders have also begun to queue up for the Transformer Prime 2. The fact of the matter is: no one tablet, be it the iPad or the Transformer Prime, alone can determine the fate of the tablet market. It is a well-known statistic that tablets make up 21% of global PC sales, and in the last quarter, for the first time ever, more tablets were sold than laptops. While Apple and Google played out the first few moves in the game, other companies sat back and smirked in the supposed stability of their PC sales. What they don't realise is that tablets are experiencing the same fate that laptops did in the 1990s: relatively expensive machines of content consumption and limited creation. It was only with the right support and nurture of a few years, did the 'tiny folding computer' prove sustainability and functionality that trumped over the orthodox desktop.
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