Edible Apple

You can line em’ all up. The HP TouchPad. The Motorola Xoom. The BlackBerry PlayBook. What these tablets all have in common is that they’ve been remarkably unsuccessful at stealing away any significant marketshare from Apple’s iPad.

Sales of the TouchPad were so low that HP ultimately decided to axe the product altogether, and Motorola and RIM’s offerings have been equally unimpressive in the marketplace.

Consequently, notebook players like Motorola appear to be “backing away from the tablet PC bandwagon” and are growing increasingly pessimistic about anybody’s chance to give the iPad a true battle in the marketplace. According to a recent report from Digitimes, tablet manufacturers are also wary of promises from Google that the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich update – which is supposed to bridge the gap between Android based smartphones and tablets – will do anything to spur an increase in tablet sales.

The sources pointed out that non-Apple players may need to wait until the Android version after Ice Cream Sandwich or Windows 8 hit the market to fight back against Apple.

Of course the most interesting threat to the iPad is Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. With a $199 price point, the device has a brand new UI that looks nothing like any other Android device on the market. Amazon’s leg up on the rest of the Android competition lies in its ability to deliver content to users without having to rely on a third party, a strategy Apple has implemented via iTunes with great success.

via Digitimes