iPad competitors that could have been, but weren’t
Posted by iPad Watcher Staff in General on Jul 14th, 2010 | 0 comments
I stumbled on this interesting article on CrunchGear that lists a series of iPad would be competitors that either never made it to the market or simply didn’t live up to the expectations. Going over the list I was reminded of a post that I wrote several months ago and which called for a reality check on the iPad competitors.
Companies that think they can just graft a touch screen onto a netbook and consider it a tablet are living in a land of fantasy. Any initiatives in this direction can only lead to ultimate failure and a lot of money poured down the drain.
CrunchGear’s list includes products from Lenovo, HP and Dell, along with several other companies. Most of these companies have already realized that a tablet computer is no place to run Windows and are moving towards Android or a proprietary system such as HP with the webOS it acquired along with Palm, recently.
HP’s initiative to acquire Palm and webOS seems to indicate that it is aware that just disguising a netbook as a tablet won’t cut it against the iPad. It still remains to be seen if they will ruin their market approach by releasing innumerable models with slight variations which confuse consumers and frustrate accessory makers.
[...] I have lost count of how many hypothetical devices have been hailed as iPad killers over the past several months. After the iPad’s huge sales success many of the companies planning to release tablet devices took a step back to reevaluate their possibilities. Many decided that the products they were planning to bring to the market weren’t up to competing with the iPad and they were canceled. [...]