Will the iPad be as Unbeatable as the iPod?

When Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPad, many observers (including me) called it a big iPod Touch. We were talking or so the similarities in excogitation and functionality. But Eastern Samoa time has exhausted on, I've started to think the iPad and the iPod may share some other trait: Invincibility.

Contemporaries after generation of audio players were expressed iPod-killers, either by their makers or by the press. And yet the iPod emerged without a wampu. Now, manufacturers are pouring resources into iPad challengers. I suspect, though, that when the dust settles on the tablet market, iPad alternatives like the Xoom may end up like the Zune.

Many people disagree with that analysis. When they theorise on the future of the iPad, they don't take the iPod experience, merely at what happened in personalized computers. Apple had a great, user-friendly OS, but it was exclusive available on Apple's computer hardware. Eventually Macs were submerged aside the greater ironware options accessible with Windows. That's the paradigm that seems to follow playing call at smartphones, in which the pioneering iPhone is existence eclipsed in market share away the transparent number of phones that run Android.

It's easy to conclude that the same will take place in tablets — as more and more companies garden truck Android tablets, that Android U. S. Army will sooner or later overrun the iPad's current dominant position.

I Don't think so. Why? There are three main reasons:

Tablets aren't Necessary.

Obviously, reasonable people rear end disagree connected this one (unreasonable people do a lot of disagreeing about IT as well), but it's my opinion. I've had an iPad since it was first released. There's much I ilk most it, but if IT stony-broke tomorrow, I wouldn't supersede it and wouldn't miss IT (much). If you disagree, I'd ask this: If you had to hold away one device — your notebook computer, your smartphone, or your pad — which would it be? I'd stake near people would choose their tablet.

Wherefore is this life-or-death? Because if a twist is utterly necessary, you make compromises ready to have one. After the innovation of the original Macintoshes, the physical figurer rapidly became a necessity for many people. If they couldn't afford a Mac, they wouldn't hold back on buying a computer, they'd buy a cheaper Windows Microcomputer. Same with the smartphone: Lots of multitude wanted an iPhone, merely it was expensive and only uncommitted connected AT&A;T. Not having a phone wasn't an option, so they tried Android alternatives.

Few people would say they absolutely have to have an MP3 musician (or, I believe, a pill). That means if they can't afford the indefinite they want now, they can wait a fewer months until they can. (And, of course, if you force out't open an iPad, you can't afford a licit tablet, period. Many on that in a import.)

User User interface is Everything

Heaps of MP3 makers tried to compete with the iPod on specs: "Ours has an Atomic number 100 tuner!", "We indorse more audio frequency formats", etc. The problem: Nobody cared. For audio players and, I'd argue, tablets, eyeglasses are hollow compared to the user interface. You neediness an interface that's clear, smooth and attractive. (For tablets, you also want lots of app options, another area Orchard apple tree has a huge advantage in.)

That's not to say that there aren't (or won't be) parts of another tablet interfaces that are better than iOS. Only trying to win over large numbers of consumers that your interface is better than Apple's — even when it is — is a tough deal.

The iPad has the Enlarged Show Me State

Unlike the iPod, the iPad was the first base significant lozenge in the market and had the field to itself for the better part of a year. No mainstream tablet has managed to undercut the iPad's price and IT's unlikely whatsoever will, given the contracts Apple is rumored to have lined up for touchscreens.

There are about 65,000 pad-peculiar apps for the iPad. The BlackBerry PlayBook is scheduled to launch with 3,000, simply my colleague Melissa Perenson says more are embarrassingly primitive and look on like old DOS programs. There are Sir Thomas More apps that will keep going Mechanical man tablets, but the number that aren't just blown-up, fuzzy versions of smartphone apps is vanishingly small.

But Apple's app advantage is impermanent, right? With more Humanoid tablets, the reasoning goes, there will be lots more than Android tablet apps. Possibly. Merely app developers accept an awful tidy sum of choices to make right now: Do they develop smartphone apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, WebOS? Do they make tab apps for the PlayBook, the iPad, or Mechanical man options? At some point, it but becomes too much and developers are going to opt for the platform that has the users. And among tablets, that's clearly the iPad.

I Bob Hope I'm Wrong

Both personally and professionally, I hope this analytic thinking is inappropriate. As the editor of PCWorld, IT's better for my business to have a spirited, interesting tablet competition to cover. It's to a greater extent play to report on and brings in more readers. And as an medium technology citizen, I think Apple's got adequate power already without completely dominating an important new cartesian product category.

Only arsenic I bet at the pad of paper market, I experience progressively like I've seen this movie before. It starred the iPod … and a bunch of other actors I've long since lost.