Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On , a column about consumer technology.
Throughout the holiday season of 2009 when netbooks were the recent commodity , Apple lost share within the PC market. It had nothing to compete with the sunken prices and shrunken sizes of these miniature laptops. PC vendors corresponding to ASUS and Acer, nonetheless, did well within the netbook segment, as they can call on their expertise in building inexpensive Windows notebooks.
After the iPad’s introduction, though, the tablets were turned. While many PC vendors loathed the low profitability of netbooks, they were now faced with competing with their very own products. Apart from HP, which shelled out billions of greenbacks for webOS, the iPad set PC vendors scrambling to determine which operating system might best compete. Is it Windows, the devil they know, or Android, where they have got far less experience than competitors from the smartphone market?
Switched On has already taken at the role that Windows might play in future tablets , but what about Honeycomb? Unlike the unique version of Android, which was within the works earlier than the introduction of the iPhone, Honeycomb arrived a year after the iPad. Android licensees, particularly smartphone vendors, surely beseeched Google for a tablet-optimized version in their preferred mobile OS. But Google can be a victim of the iPad’s jujutsu.
For while entering the tablet market helps the viability of Android and keeps competitive pressure on Apple, Google itself has relatively little to realize from a powerful presence within the tablet market notwithstanding it could gain any such foothold. It’s becoming clear that much of tablet usage is in the house and growth is coming on the expense of notebooks, where Google already has dominant market share in search. Unlike in smartphones, where Android was ready to ride the wave of carrier preference to become a force to be reckoned with inside the U.S., there’s a much more tenuous tie between the tablet and cellular service. And while we’re beginning to see more big names consisting of Acer, Sony and Samsung follow Motorola down the Honeycomb path, we’re also seeing companies opt out that will hit price points which are farther afield from where Apple is playing.
After all, there’s the argument that Android tablets also cause competitive pain for Google’s search competitor Microsoft. But Microsoft is easily on its approach to an expanded presence in another computing setting that represents a greater opportunity for Android: the car. Greater than a decade after the disappointing debut of the AutoPC, Microsoft has created a winning partnership with Ford on Sync . And on the IFA Press Conference in Alicante, Ford announced that it really is expanding Sync to Europe . Clearly that opens a driver’s side door for Android to power competitive systems. And if Android won’t step in, car companies have another choice in MeeGo, that’s being developed in a dashboard-centric version.
Car companies are notoriously slow in integrating new technologies, however the vehicle is a platform where Apple has chosen to compliment behind the curve with third-party connections in preference to address the chance head-on, so Google can play to the type of distribution that made Android a smartphone powerhouse. More importantly, cars are probably the second one-strongest devices behind the smartphone for connecting sellers to buyers within the physical world.
And that’s simply core to Google’s revenue stream. The corporate has demonstrated that it realizes this with its work on driving directions in its navigation app and has tried to seed the market with car docks for products like Nexus One and Droid smartphones. Like Microsoft, Google is performing some great work in voice recognition this is 0 showing up on Android handsets 0 . Sync has shown, though, how intelligent in-vehicle multimedia control can nicely complement smartphones. For Google, an integrated offering for the imminently connected car is a more important long-term priority than the relative homebody that’s the slate.
Ross Rubin ( 1 @rossrubin 1 ) is executive director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research and analysis firm 2 The NPD Group 2 . Views expressed in Switched On are his own.
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