The tablet wars are heating up, but Apple may have already won. It’s a jungle out there, but with three-quarters of the worldwide tablet market captured, the iPad rules as the 800-pound gorilla.
Not that its competitors aren’t trying. And not that the iPad 2 has superior hardware. It doesn’t. Take display tech, for example. At 132 pixels per inch, the iPad 2’s touchscreen is less detailed than those of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, RIM BlackBerry PlayBook (both 170ppi), and Motorola Xoom (150ppi).
The iPad 2’s cameras are laughable. Its front-facing FaceTime facilitator captures images at a measly 640x480 resolution -- less than one-third of a megapixel -- and its back camera can only manage 0.92 megapixels. Compare those stats with the PlayBook’s 3MP front camera and 5MP rear camera, or the Xoom’s 2MP front and 5MP back.
The iPad 2’s dual-core A5 processor is more in line with those of its competition. It clocks in at 1GHz, though it throttles down to the high 800MHz range when apps don’t need its full power. The dual-core processors in the Galaxy Tab, Xoom, and PlayBook are, like the A5, built around the ARM Cortex-A9 architecture (the Xoom uses Nvidia’s Tegra 2 implementation) and run at 1GHz. But the HP TouchPad outclocks them all with its dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 that, like the A5, packs some serious graphics chops.
Then there’s connectivity. Although Apple’s 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi is shared by its competitors -- well, the Galaxy Tab and TouchPad omit 802.11a, but who really cares? -- Apple hasn’t revealed its 4G wide-area broadband plans. The Xoom will soon offer a free 4G LTE upgrade, and the PlayBook is scheduled for optional 4G WiMAX and LTE, as well as HSPA+, a.k.a. Evolved HSPA -- faster than 3G but slower than 4G.
But the iPad will maintain its tablet-market dominance despite its hardware mediocrity. After all, specs are of little interest to the general public -- it’s the user experience that counts. And, let’s be honest, the marketing too. Apple’s lead in both may be unassailable.
Not that iOS is perfect. Its multitasking capabilities are primitive when compared to the TouchPad’s webOS or the PlayBook’s BlackBerry Tablet OS, which can perform such tricks as streaming HD video over the tablet’s micro-HDMI port while simultaneously running another app on the PlayBook’s display. The Xoom’s Android 3.0 operating system is a step up from the version 2.2 running the Galaxy Tab, but Android is fussy and disjointed. Despite its limitations, however, Android has the tremendous advantage of being open source. In addition, it has a powerful partner in Intel, which is busily porting version 3.0 to its x86 architecture, promising that tablets based on its low-power chips and running Android 3.0 will appear this year.
But the BlackBerry Tablet OS, based on the QNX OS used for everything from routers to cars, is a not-ready-for-prime-time kludge that, when it shipped, required you to tether to a BlackBerry smartphone to access your email, contacts, and calendars. If the world were fair, iOS’s most formidable competitor would be webOS -- which, admittedly, bombed in its Palm Pre smartphone incarnation. Its card-based interface is user-friendly, its developer tools are solid, and it’s backed by HP, the world’s No. 1 computer maker -- which, by the way, plans to include a version of webOS on all its consumer PCs.
But the world isn’t fair -- and iOS is on over 100 million iPhones, a powerful pre-sales tool for the iPad. Don’t expect any tablet to catch up, especially after the iPad 3 appears. Apple doesn’t stand still.
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Since the late 1980s, Rik Myslewski has paid his rent by keeping an eye on Apple. He was editor-in-chief of MacAddict from 2001 until its transformation into Mac|Life in early 2007, and is now a member of the snarkily sophisticated team at London’s The Register, which is “biting the hand that feeds IT” daily at www.theregister.co.uk.
