What I find stunning is that Apple is about to launch the iPad 2 and we are still waiting for the first credible Android-based tablet, aside from the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Note that the first iPad launched almost a year ago in April of 2010.
Apple’s time-to-market in tablets has generated at least five key advantages for the company:
1. Apple has locked up the market for critical components, including 60% of the global supply of 10” touch capacitive screens.
2. The company is much further along the learning curve in tablets, with refined hardware and software as well as more efficient production through its partnership with Foxconn.
3. Apple has achieved significant economies of scale to drive down per unit costs, having already shipped and sold 15m+ iPads.
4. The company has developed a sizable collection of complements in the form of apps and content (via iTunes) and physical accessories.
5. Apple has generated strong brand awareness around the iPad, given the limited competition for consumer mind share in this market.
These aforementioned advantages build upon Apple’s already significant, corporate advantages in the areas of technology, distribution (e.g., retail stores), customer service, and overall brand recognition.
Credible Android-based tablets will arrive soon. For instance, the Motorola Xoom is due to hit stores this Thursday. However, it may take some time (measured in years) for competitors to catch up to Apple in this market.
I spent $3000 on the laptop I'm using, and these tablets are positioned to replace it. I think it's a good deal at any sub-$1000 price, even if it's not quite as absolutely powerful in the areas I'm used to having power.
Fair enough, but that depends entirely on what you're using that $3k laptop for...
Personally, a $500-1000 tablet + $2k desktop would give me considerably more value and mobility than a $3k laptop.
A $500 tablet can't replace my $200 (new) netbook.
I'm a writer, a touch screen tablet where a usable keyboard obscures my work area (IE being able to see what I have written) makes the device useless for work. It becomes solely a glorified ebook reader with the added perk that I could actually edit something should I want to go through an excessive hassle of dealing with no keyboard.
Meh. Wires. While others are struggling to squeeze in an HDMI connector, Apple has already moved on to wireless HD video with its AppleTV. Plug 2 cables into the $99 box, tap AirPlay -> AppleTV, and it's on.
You'll be interested in tablets when also-rans catch up to obsolete tech. Apple's move pushes video interfacing toward the middle of the 21st century, not the latter 20th.
Your comment suggests you don't know about DNLA, which all sorts of Android devices and Consumer Electronics (TVs, DVD players, games consoles) have had for ages.
I'm personally excited for Mobile Hi-definition Link which Samsung is rolling out right now to high end phones. It makes the standard USB micro connection do double duty as video out and can power your device from the TV at the same time via a single cable. Should make big screen gaming using the mobile device as a combined controller and game console a lot more viable.
It is of course an industry standard, rather than some Apple-only proprietary cable, dongle or licensing scheme, which I thought we had moved past.
So your saying that Apple should simply drop a protocol they invented in 2004 for one that came wasn't developed until 2006 and didn't gain any traction until 2010?
It's not obvious what you're referring to, but the answer's "yes", Apple should be working with others instead of re-inventing square wheels that happen to fit only their car and come with licence fees and usage restrictions.
I personally decided I was tired of this behaviour when they made a crappy copy of FLAC and even stole the name (they just took out the "Free" and replaced it with "Apple", how appropriate) instead of just using it as-is. There's plenty of other examples.
I'm referring to you saying that Apple should drop years of development and investment in their proprietary protocol for someone else's. And still doesn't support DRM. DLNA is great if you own all your media and have taken the time to encode it but fails miserably once you get into online purchases and rentals.
FLAC, ALAC who cares. They both do what it says on the tin Lossless Audio Codec.
Apple does what Apple does and the world can certainly support more than one type of system. They go off and do their own thing and have been punished and rewarded for it.
This type of concept is common in our geeky nature.
A tablet does not need HDMI. The average user would never use it. If you are waiting for HDMI for a tablet...you are doing it wrong. Get a 100$ apple TV thats always plugged into your computer and control it with your iPad as an amazing touchscreen remote.
Think presentations. One of the first things my girlfriend asked my about the iPad was "can I plug it into a projector and run presentations?" To her this was the first use that came to mind. I imagine she isn't the only one. More and more projectors are coming with HDMI as standard and being able to plug in your tablet directly without worrying about needing to buy a separate adapter will be a boon to many people.
if you're looking for a tablet to be a laptop replacement, it needs HDMI out. i don't consume 100% of media in my own house, and 100% of my friends aren't upgrading to a web TV with me.
One of the key features of laptops is mobility, it's still nice to plug in a big screen and a keyboard for when you need to. People seem excited about that feature in a phone, why not in a tablet? (Note this may not make sense if you've accidentally bought a tablet that only functions well when paired with a full computer).
In terms of absolute dollars I agree. As a consumer though, I'm going to be looking very hard at what I am getting for an extra 20% cost over the iPad. Many consumers are still going to consider the iPad a much better value.
Presumably there are at least a few people who don't buy the absolute cheapest iPad out there, right? My understanding is that there are a few different iPads with different amounts of storage and whatnot, with prices that vary by a few hundred dollars. (Correct me if I'm totally off-base here.)
Someone looking to buy a $500 iPad might well be put off by a $600 price tag on another tablet. On the other hand, someone looking to buy a $700 iPad (or even a $500 iPad plus a $30 case for it) probably won't be, I wouldn't think.
The first gen iPad was announced on January 27, 2010. It was available on April 3, 2010. That's 2 months between announcement and launch.
Apple could afford to release information that far in advance, because it didn't replace an existing Apple product and there was no competition from other vendors. This year, the situation is different. I'm willing to bet that the second gen iPad will be available within 5 weeks of its announcement. (If I'd have to guess, I'd say Saturday, April 2.)
I believe it will be available in March or April. My evidence? The Apple store is now selling "refurbished" iPads at pretty decent discounts. This almost always happens right before they update a product:
It's not scientific, but Apple generally tries to clear inventory of the current model by selling brand new units as "refurbished" through their online store a week or two in advance.
By the way, this method of predicting when an Apple product is about to be updated has never steered me wrong in the past.
Unlikely. Apple has moved just about all of its non-computer release cycles to yearly (iPhones have been yearly from the start, iPods have been slowly moved to the yearly September event). April at the latest.
And note that Apple has yet to announce anything (they probably won't announce the iPad 2 ever, they'll just go "hey here's the iPad 2" one day, as they generally do for product refreshes).
However, it may take some time (measured in years) for competitors to catch up to Apple in this market.
That means if someone can get their act together and catch up in just 1 year, they can lock up a still enviable #2 spot. I'm talking about having good execution on the device, the software, and a competing set of complements.
Not only does Apple engender the love of many, it also garners much dislike. This amounts to a huge resource which can be leveraged for marketing.
Totally agree, I love my iPad, yes the first version didn't have a camera and would've been cool with the retina display but come on, there isn't one Android tablet out there that does as good a job for the price.
It's fundamentally changed the way I do things too, I no longer buy a daily paper, i just grab my Times subscription every morning, read books on it and stream shows/films via Air Video Server and a host of other fun stuff.
Find me an Android tablet that can compare and I'll consider that.
But it doesn't run the dominant phone OS on the market. And that fact is actually quite important. It's true that no single Android phone is close to the sales of iPhone, but it's most certainly true that from an OS perspective, Android is leading the way with iOS in second place.
Android isn't really leading, it is just allowing carriers to release "smart" phones in the free to-$199 price range, which is what most people expect to pay for a phone.
If there was an iPhone available for every carrier and it cost $20, then nobody would be using Android except the hard-core Linux hackers (like myself).
I am not complaining about this situation at all, as I love Android and hate Apple, but let's be honest as to what is actually going on. Cheap crap = sales.
If there was an iPhone available for every carrier and it cost $20, then nobody would be using Android except the hard-core Linux hackers (like myself).
That might well be true, but it ignores the reality of the facts that there isn't an iPhone available for every carrier for $20, and that Android devices are presently outselling it.
Cheap crap = sales, but you don't get to pretend that those sales don't count just because they involve cheap crap.
Cheap crap = sales, but you don't get to pretend that those sales don't count just because they involve cheap crap.
I wouldn't count them as much, though. A really large number of Android phones get sold to people who don't want to buy apps.
Or maybe that doesn't matter if you're not a mobile developer. But was there some other relevance to the whole iOS vs Android spiel that was brought up in the parent comment? Because attracting developers is the only thing I can think of that would make OS marketshare matter at all.
No, Android phones are currently selling faster than iPhones (in the US). In terms of absolute numbers (and also counting iPods and iPads as iOS devices) it's think it's quite close (if you find trustworthy numbers, let me know).
But never mind Android, the dominant phone OS is still Symbian although nobody would say it is "leading the way".
Important to who and why? I'm not disagreeing, but I don't think it hurts apples profits much at the end of the day. I'm waiting to see how android manages to cope with the divergence of devices that will be running on it.
Seems like they did pretty well, especially when you consider that they only released with one carrier and there are large barriers to users jumping carriers that are totally unrelated to the quality of the iPhone.
With iPad, there's no such issue. Essentially nobody is trapped in a long-term contract they'd have to break if they buy an iPad.
While that was probably tongue-in-cheek and meant to be humorous, Walt Mossberg is one of the more respected tech reviewers and is pretty clear on his ethics policy, which you can read here.
Mossberg and a few others are pretty well known as "controlled leak" sources for Apple: they're respected, they tend to not go for the crap/shock value, and they're usually quite appreciated by Cupertino.
An Apple exec can pick up a phone and give Mossberg a few actual facts (a bit hidden in the subtext of inquiring about his health, let's not be too overt), I don't think there's anything in that which would go against his ethics policy. Though I may have missed that section.
Like many, I was eager to get my hands on it. But Apple changing their rules mid-game and a probable removal of the Kindle app left a sour taste in my mouth.
Buy a Kindle unit. It's the best piece of hardware that I have bought in a long time. If you were going to do a lot of reading on the iPad then you can't go wrong with it.
Not grandparent, but will try to answer anyway. I do mostly scientific software development and analytics for a bioinformatics lab. Being able to carry around all the academic papers I need with me at all time, together with supplementary material and online manuals in PDF form, is tremendous for me. What's even better, I can highlight and make notes right in those PDFs with GoodReader. Unlike most other eReaders, iPad has a color screen, and in my field (computational biology and genetics) this is crucial as nearly every paper published in the big three (Nature/Science/Cell) has complex color diagrams in it.
I have been using Penultimate (notebook-like app where you can scribble with a stylus) to lay out nearly all of my ideas. Because I develop algorithms as well, only being able to type (as on a laptop) is not good enough for me. I need to be able to jolt down diagrams/drawings with a pen/stylus all the time. I can immediately email any of my notes/diagrams (or the entire notebook) as a PDF file to collaborators that I have in my Contacts list in the Mail app. I don't have to carry around several unwieldy notebooks in my bag anymore. The only things I carry in my messenger bag now are: MacBook, iPad, vacuum flask with hot coffee (if the workstations at work were Macs, I wouldn't even have to carry the MacBook). No more paper!
The iPad has VPN and an SSH app, so away from work I can login and view how my clusters are doing.
I am able to do the things I listed above on a single device (except software development). The reason I carry around a MacBook is only because I compile code at work for Linux platform and I like to have a second non-Linux but UNIX computer to check code portability, which I wouldn't be able to do with Windows anyway (don't get me started on Cygwin).
1. PDFs are much easier to read on a vertical-format screen unless said screen is very large (would need to twist modern wide-screen laptops sideways). Also, I prefer that my reading device is not heavy and that it is small enough to read while on standing on public transportation -- this way I can get heads up on things before arriving to work.
2. The ability to annotate documents directly using finger input is amazing (I am not talking about handwriting -- I am talking about yellow-highlighting passages and keywords without using the classic trackpad and cursor combo which requires a stable platform for it to be usable).
3. The ability to just take the PDF/document/notes/whatever and bring it over to my boss next door is irreplaceable. Laptop is too heavy and cumbersome to hold with one hand, and email/file-sharing is cumbersome as well -- bosses are generally unwilling to listen to their subordinates tell them to open this or that file while they are in the middle of something on their screen. This is why most offices have stuck with paper for so long -- it is great to be able to carry something in your hand and just show it to somebody across the floor. Likewise, it is easier for my boss (who also has an iPad) to just show me some document without having to print it or email it to me or walk me over across the lab to his computer.
"Laptop is too heavy and cumbersome to hold with one hand, and email/file-sharing is cumbersome as well -- bosses are generally unwilling to listen to their subordinates tell them to open this or that file while they are in the middle of something on their screen."
The importance of this is under-recognized.
A friend realized it is much cheaper to just pre-load an iPad with demo software and mail it free to a prospective client, than to fly to said customer and arrange for meeting times and persuade them to load & run software on their computers. Open an envelope, turn it on, start using the product - send us a check and we'll keep it on and send you more. "$500, it just works" is _cheap_ for what it buys.
I'm a software engineer by day, and a software/hardware hacker at night also working on my own start-up. I require reference to be easy and without lag. Once I build up a flow of thoughts and ideas that I've compiled from a list of sources, I like to be able to reference them and organize them without having books lying about everywhere.
I recently learned Objective-C pretty rapidly by having access to multiple books at the same time and consuming them in parallel. When I would have trouble understanding one concept in one book, I would move to another book that could explain the concept better to me. So I was book-sourcing my learning.
iBooks is sufficient for this, but I've been thinking about building my own tool that processes information the way I do and keeping the journal handy.
My set-up is (left to right): 27Inch Cinema Display, iPad on stand, MacBook Pro.
I use my cinema display for coding and browsing, the macbook for logs/stderr/stdout, and I use the iPad as a book reference. So I can flip back and forth around the iPad if I need to, or I can take my iPad to another workspace on my workbench and not have to deal with lugging my laptop around.
I teach part-time. Being able to use an instant-on, anytime-anywhere networking device lets me juggle an extra class amid whatever sporadic 5-15 minute breaks I can find. My iPad paid for itself in 3 weeks.
I'm in the same boat you are. I love my android phone because I use google apps for my business and gmail for my personal - but I wasn't overly impressed when I played with the Xoom. I love the new format for Google Talk, Gmail and Maps, but the screen quality seemed not as stunning as the original iPad. I'm waiting myself to see the iPad 2, but I will be getting something this time around as well.
Yep. I planned on buying the iPad 2 but I’m not so sure anymore. I will probably wait another few months and play around with the competitors first. That WebOS tablet also looks great but I don’t know whether I want to wait that long.
I'm trying to think of features that would get me to trade up from my original iPad.
A Retina display would do it, but it sounds like that's not happening this time round.
FaceTime? I already have a couple of devices that do FaceTime.
Thinner or lighter? It would have to be significantly lighter before I'd even consider it.
So I'm quite sure I will stick with my original iPad, at least until v3. It's a killer device that's completely changed the way I read, the way I watch TV, the way I spend my "leisure computing" time, and the way I listen to music at home, and I'm certainly very happy I jumped in early.
A display that is readable is bright sunlight. I'd pay another $800 for that one. Ok, I'd at least think about it. :-)
Also, if it could handle pen input and finger input sensibly. There are hacks for iPad stylus input, but they're all a little unwieldy, especially if you want to rest your hand on the device.
I held out. As much as I like dead tree CS books, lugging relevant ones around has become too much of a pain. Add to that the awesome offer from O'Reilly for $5 ebook versions of books you already own, and the ipad becomes irresistible to me.
I've just been holding out for a lighter version. I think the original ipad is just a bit too heavy.
O'Reilly sells DRM-free ebooks through their store, so they're unaffected. You load the ebooks onto the iPad using the usual transfer methods for media.
It's one of the nice side-effects of selling DRM-free books: they don't need an app that has the DRM baked-in -- you can use iBooks or any third-party reader.
A downside to this approach is not having an easy way to purchase books without a computer. iBooks has a great checkout experience and the only way O'Reilly could have something similar is by coughing up 30%. Tech savvy users can figure installing something like GoodReader and then downloading the PDF in MobileSafari and sending it over to GoodReader, but it's a UX nightmare. O'Reilly at least has technical users, other publishers are even more screwed if they want to go non-DRM.
Given that O'Reilly books are of technical nature, and you can't actually code on an iPad (unless you're using SSH/VPN), this is a perfect fit for the O'Reilly... you'll need a computer anyway.
Furthermore, I'm never on vacation and think, Oh, I'd love t read up on RoR... I usually already have the book.
I want to get one tablet, and a new phone. I also want one iOS device, and one Android device. As soon as it is clear which combination of OS and form factor is optimal I will buy. Probably leaning towards Android phone, and iPad at this stage, but still not quite ready to buy.
I held out for several months but broke down in July and picked one up as a reward to myself for getting a job :) I'm jumping right on the iPad 2 when it comes out though. I'll just sell my old iPad, thanks to the good resale value of Apple gear.
I've been waiting for the iPad 2 to see what it can do, but after this subscription stuff and a potential removal of the Kindle app makes me care much less.
I'm curious to see how right the rumours are about the new design. From the case designs which have leaked, the iPad 2 is significantly thinner, with two cameras. I'm also expecting a dual core CPU and 1gb RAM, dual cameras, but no "retina display".
If it really is as thin as rumoured I'm impressed.
I wonder how many apps in the app store that use multithreading will suddenly break a lot more frequently because of the second core.[1] Rare, freak crashes and glitches could suddenly become unusably frequent. Maybe all apps submitted with SDK < 4.4 (or whatever) will be pinned to one CPU?
[1] most race conditions will only trigger on a uniprocessor system if preempted, which is fairly unlikely if the racy data accesses are close together.
Apple pretty heavily promotes using their concurrency frameworks (GCD, dispatch queues, etc.) that don't require the direct creation of threads by application code [1]. Do you think many applications ignore that and use threads on iOS anyway?
That doesn't really change anything. GCD still uses a thread-based concurrency model, and it's no more or less affected by race conditions than pthreads.
Also GCD is relatively new to iOS, and not the only concurrency API in Cocoa, so yes many apps will still be using (and will continue to use) traditional threads.
GCD is an abstraction that uses queues to communicate work items between pools of worker threads. It has much in common with the actor model in this regard. It doesn't immunize the programmer against race conditions, but it certainly does make them easier to avoid than using pthreads directly.
Unfortunately, work queues aren't a great abstraction for serialisisg access to a shared resource. Given that all iOS devices so far have had a single CPU core, most uses of threading will have been for things like network I/O, audio, or running larger computations in a non-UI-thread, rather than dispatching work items to many CPUs.
Furthermore, GCD has only been around since iOS 4.0, so if your app needs to be compatible to 3.x, you can't use it.
> Maybe all apps submitted with SDK < 4.4 (or whatever)
SDK < iOS5, likely, if they decide to play it safe (or some kind of attribute in the bundle). I highly doubt Apple is going to fork iOS again for no reason at all, 4.3 has yet to be released and iOS5 is 4-5 months away tops.
I feel it's too harsh to downvote you (so I didn't), but you've pretty much admitted that you don't have enough information to speculate - perhaps you shouldn't. It's not about system software supporting threads; it's about user code not being thread-safe in the presence of hardware parallelism. There are some multi-threading bugs that never show up without it.
Right, but it's extremely difficult to get concurrency right at the application level. Anything that works usually works by chance, and changing the hardware that a multithreaded program runs on is a great way to find out how you fucked up the implementation.
Right now, it's likely that a lot of bugs are not showing themselves regularly, so nobody has bothered running any diagnostic tools (Helgrind, etc.)
I agree with you that people are really bad at concurrency, but I disagree that it's that hard once you get used to it.
Once you deal with one large deep difficult highly concurrent project, you get used to the idea that when there are threads and mutexes involved you have to think REALLY HARD about how it should work, and you can't rely on just trying something and testing it like you can with normal code. And if you do that, you can get threads to work pretty reliably, not just by chance.
I have an iPad. I love my iPad. That said, it's too heavy. 1.5lbs is really light when you have a laptop that you set down to use, but when you actually hold the device whenever you're using it, that weight adds up. It needs a better display. Please don't misunderstand me, the iPad has an amazing display compared to what was available when it launched. When you hold an iPhone 3GS up to an iPad the phone looks like it's using 16 bit EGA. But the galaxy tab and the iPhone 4 have raised the bar for what consumers expect. Finally, it needs at least a front facing and would benefit from two cameras. The new iPad also needs FaceTime. Also, if apple were smart they'd add the same camera the iPhone 4 uses to the rear. That would further lock up production capacity so that competitors can't use the backlit camera technology in their stuff. I'll be watching the keynote live if at all possible and I'll be following by liveblog if not. Should be a great event.
The 'Retina' display would definitely be a huge leap forward but can they make the screens iPad size for a reasonable cost yet? From what I understood that wasn't possible.
Camera is a no-brainer addition. Facetime/Skype video on an ipad would be amazing. I am starting to offload tasks from my computer to my iPad and this is another I would like to do. I already Skype on the iPad while working on my computer.
There is a charm to having trivial tasks, anything well suited to the app world, on a separate device than your computer. Somewhat like an extra monitor...but even more detached.
What do you mean by a better display? Merely a higher resolution? The iPad’s IPS panel is great and I personally hope that they don’t go with other technologies. An increased resolution would be nice but unlikely.
I'm always amazed that people think the iPad display is good. The text always looks blurry and poorly antialiased to me which I attribute to the fact that it has quite low DPI. Further to that the minute I walk out the door I can barely see anything on the screen - it's just not bright enough. I love the iPad in a few ways but the display is one of the things I dislike.
The iPad has the ppi of a 15" screen with a 1680x1050 resolution. No low ppi count by any means. It uses the same non-subpixel antialiasing as OS X and tests showed that it can get pretty bright and pretty black. Certainly no worse than a laptop screen.
By better I meant a retina display level resolution ideally behind gorilla glass. As I'd said, the iPad display is great, but the market expects more now.
A display of that resolution is infeasible with current GPUs, though. The device would be a combination of too large, too heavy, and/or have too short battery life. I don't even think it will be feasible in the next iteration; perhaps the one after.
I honestly think they made the resolution only 1024x768 on purpose to reduce the amount of time it will take to be able to cost-effectively double it. If they had shipped with a 1280x800 screen (like the Xoom's) off the bat, it would probably tack on an extra iteration before they could double it.
I'm still baffled by the lack of a camera on the first gen iPad. I'm sure there must have been a good reason for leaving it out but it seems like such a no brainer. It's pretty disappointing since there are a bunch of iPad apps I'd like to write that would require a camera but I don't want to release something that only works on the new ones.
Baffled, why so? Apple has never let perfection come before goodness. Or, more accurately, profit. Apple has likely made somewhere around a billion dollars profit off of the initial iPad release.
It seems the iPad was released not too long ago so it's 'fun' that the current iPads will have such a dive in value with the new iPad2 hitting the streets.
I know it's been released in April, but that's just in the US. It arrived in the rest of the EU at the end of July (and I bought mine in September).
Of all things Apple could release more often, they pick the iPad...
As an iPad 1st gen owner I hope at least they would release some attachable iSight camera for the iPad. Because video calling is about the only thing I would want it to do in order to be a decent Skype station.
Personally I've found little value in the iPad. A pocketable iPod Touch is perfect for light email reading, quick browsing, and Skype calls while a Kindle is much nicer for book reading. Furthermore, these two added weigh less than the iPad!
On a side note, I wish articles would just say "guessers expect the iPad 2 to be thinner ... blah blah" instead of analysts. I'm getting tired of "analysts" who "predict" but play no role in the creation.
i am much more interested in the new Macbook Pro that are rumored to be announced on Thursday. With an event a week later that now seems unlikely though.
Don't worry, your first gen iPad will be perfectly fine and you'll continue to do all the fascinating things that you're already doing with it. Do you change your iPhone/macbook (if you have them) every time a new one comes out? I hope not, and that's the same with the ipads.
how do you know what the market demands? you know through sales. The market liked a big iPhone 3, so it is reasonable to predict that they will like a big iPhone 4.
Feature list:
- front facing camera
- "retinal" display
- iPhone 4 style designing
In the past couple years Apple has shown a much better ability at predicting what the market demands than random internet commentators. I don't think their thought process for the iPad was "big iPhone 3," as they changed many applications. The iPad 2 may share many features with the iPhone 4 because Apple now has the knowledge to execute those features and the technology is now mature, but the reasoning wouldn't be to "make a bigger version of the iPhone 4."
Apple’s time-to-market in tablets has generated at least five key advantages for the company:
1. Apple has locked up the market for critical components, including 60% of the global supply of 10” touch capacitive screens.
2. The company is much further along the learning curve in tablets, with refined hardware and software as well as more efficient production through its partnership with Foxconn.
3. Apple has achieved significant economies of scale to drive down per unit costs, having already shipped and sold 15m+ iPads.
4. The company has developed a sizable collection of complements in the form of apps and content (via iTunes) and physical accessories.
5. Apple has generated strong brand awareness around the iPad, given the limited competition for consumer mind share in this market.
These aforementioned advantages build upon Apple’s already significant, corporate advantages in the areas of technology, distribution (e.g., retail stores), customer service, and overall brand recognition.
Credible Android-based tablets will arrive soon. For instance, the Motorola Xoom is due to hit stores this Thursday. However, it may take some time (measured in years) for competitors to catch up to Apple in this market.