Articles about iPad

Sony Electronics rang in 2012 with a surprising discount that may foreshadow much about the tablet market this year. Overnight I received email from a Sony spokeswoman saying the company "has permanently dropped the price of the Sony Tablet S by $100 starting today". This follows what seemed like a temporary $50 discount right before Christmas. If you paid $499.99 or $599.99 before Santa's sleigh ride, 16GB Sony S is now $399.99 and 32GB 499.99.

SonyStyle Store doesn't yet list the new pricing as permanent, merely "save $100 instantly". "On top of these savings, Sony is also currently offering (for a limited time) a store credit and five free Video Unlimited movie rentals, five free PlayStation Store game downloads and 180 days of free Music Unlimited service with the purchase of a Tablet", the spokeswoman says.

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This is the first year Apple will operate without its co-founder and leader Steve Jobs. To move forward without him, what does the company need to do in the new year? While I've never fancied myself a prognosticator, I do have a few suggestions on what the Cupertino, Calif. company needs to do.

Some have to do with changing the way Apple works and does business; others require some hard decisions on Apple's product lines. Either way, 2012 will give us the first glimpse whether or not Apple can move on from its past and iconic leader.

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The most successful brands define their category/function, like Xerox for "print". According to research NPD released today, for many business decision makers "tablet" means "iPad".

"The iPad, just as it is in the consumer market, is synonymous for 'tablet' in the business market, leaving Apple poised to take advantage of the increased spending intentions of these SMBs", says Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis. Those spending intentions are on the rise, with 73 percent of businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees planning to buy tablets -- eh, iPads -- during the next 12 months. That's up from 68 percent in second quarter.

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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has told an Italian newspaper that the company would release a Nexus tablet within six months. Google's sudden turnabout on releasing a signature Android tablet may reflect his confidence that regulators will approve the Motorola acquisition and concern about Amazon coming to dominate the Android tablet market.

Six months is way late in a market overrun by tablets -- more than 100 -- but with just a handful pulling meaningful sales. Apple's iPad 2 is the market leader by huge margin, according to IDC. In second quarter, iPad media tablet share, based on shipments, was 61.5 percent. Second-ranked Samsung: 5.6 percent. There's no question Google should have released a tablet -- that's past tense -- as in six months ago instead of six months from now. Year ago would have been even better.

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The year 2011 will go down in the history books as a great year for tablets mostly for Apple’s iPad, however -- not all tablet vendors fared as well as Apple. It'’s not for lack of products that prevented Android tablets from taking any market share away from Apple this year. By our calculation, over 100 tablets were introduced since the iPad.

However, we defy even the most tech-savvy of you to name more than a few of them. What was so wrong with the competition that it failed to make any inroads in the tablet market, at least until the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook came along? I'll explain why we think Apple and Amazon will continue to dominate the market well into 2012.

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Microsoft on Monday quietly released an iPad-specific version of Office OneNote, the note-taking application in Microsoft's Office suite.

At CES last year, Microsoft's OneNote team admitted that few people were using OneNote even though it had been part of Office for the better part of a decade. As an application class that lent itself nicely to mobile use (evinced by Evernote) its utility on a PC was less than obvious.

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All signs point to an iPad Christmas, for many people this year. But it's a pricey gift, starting at $499, and Apple isn't giving much away. Over the past 24 hours, I stumbled onto some unexpected Android alternatives that will put more than just a shiny new tablet under the Christmas tree.

Simply put: If you're looking for a tablet but need to accessorize, iPad 2 will tighten your gifting budget. Meanwhile, competitors serve up some sweet deals that will let you give more for about the same price, or even less. If you think nothing compares to iPad 2, you're wrong.

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"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo."

That's some of the text from Apple's famous "Think Different" marketing campaign from 1997 to 2002. The promotional likened Apple and Mac users to legendary individuals who stepped outside the mainstream, who expressed their independence and defied convention. Today, iPad is the status quo for tablets. What irony. Buyers of 1.2 million non-iPad tablets, sold at US retail, are the individualists -- the rebels who dared buy something else.

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US Thanksgiving is this Thursday, and their friends across the ocean have something for the Apple Fanclub of bloggers and journalists to be grateful for: Canalys predictions that the Mac maker will be the No. 1 PC vendor next year -- gasp, possibly during holiday 2011. "HP and Apple will fight for top position in Q4, but Apple may have to wait for the release of iPad 3 before it passes HP", Canalys analyst Tim Coulling says.

It's an amazing proclamation, considering that IDC put Mac global share at a puny 5.2 percent in third quarter. You'll read lots of gleeful headlines today about how Apple is going to strip HP's britches, then leap to the top spot. Canalys' magical prediction is all about counting. Is a tablet a PC? The UK-based analysis firm says yes, and adding iPad to the mix pulls Apple up from the doldrums to the stratosphere.

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What? You expected something more reasonably priced, given the recession? Bwhahaha. You're gonna be Grinch if you give anything less. Today, Nielsen released its holiday wish survey for kids ages 6 to 12. It's what they want to buy in the next six months, but Santa comes sooner.

Holiday shopping for school-aged pre-teens isn't what it used to be. Bicycles, train sets, Barbies, Hello Kitty goodies aren't good enough for the youngest Millennials. Forty-four percent want iPads, up from 31 percent last holiday. I guess not enough six-to-twelves got Apple tablets last year.

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But you knew that already, right?

Today, DisplaySearch issued the most unusual of tablet forecasts -- one that looks at the totality of the market and takes Windows into consideration. Gartner and IDC use a separate "media tablet" category for Android tablets and iPad, based on the operating system, choosing to classify "Tablet PCs" running Windows as personal computers. DisplaySearch has more sensibly made the designation around processors -- ARM and x86 -- which better defines the market for the future, and isn't the future what a forecast is all about?

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It's no secret iPad owners love their devices. The American Customer Satisfaction Index and NPD both report unusually high satisfaction rates for iPad. Just in second quarter, Apple sold more than 9 million tablets, generating $6 billion in revenue. Despite the best efforts of competitors, most of which offer tablets running Android OS, nothing has yet put a dent in iPad’s dominance among consumers. The fact of the matter is that, if you own a tablet right now, it most likely is iPad.

There’s  another group equally smitten by iPad: higher education. I’m not talking about students, faculty or university administrators that own the tablets (I would lump these people in with the consumer category), but rather the growing number of  higher-ed institutions around the country that currently issue iPads to their students.

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Amazon's unveiling of the Kindle Fire on Wednesday took the eReader ever closer to becoming a full-fledged tablet device. With the move, Amazon will now have its devices ever-more increasingly compared to tablets rather than other e-readers in its class.

The most obvious comparison is price. At $199, Amazon is clearly aiming to get as many Fires in the hands of consumers as possible. It could see the device as a loss leader, hoping to make up any lost margins on the sales of content from its music and entertainment services.

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In late August, software developers MoboTap released Dolphin, the popular browser formerly exclusive to the Android platform, on iOS. Today, the tablet-specific version called Dolphin Browser HD is available for free in the iTunes App store.

Though Dolphin has a number of useful browser features such as tabs, sidebars, speed dial, desktop mode, and auto-completing URLS, there are two features that make this browser remarkable: Gesture browsing and Webzine mode, which launched on Android back in July.

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Fifty Betanews readers and I were among the very first people to test a content discovery engine called Zite last year. It was a solid idea --harvesting keywords from your Twitter feed and Delicious bookmarks to learn the things you might be interested in, and subsequently finding and suggesting news articles to you-- but it still had a long way to go.

That service eventually grew into an iPad magazine in the vein of Flipboard, but with the underlying content recommendation engine that we saw very early on in the Zite beta. After the positive reception it received as a standalone iPad app, CNN Worldwide president Jim Walton today announced that CNN has acquired Zite.

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