Running Up the Score

Mark Sigal on the iPad 2:

For while it may be tempting to see the battle between iOS-powered iPads and Android-powered tablets as likely to be close, the truth is that Apple is blowing out the competition. The competition has no offense, no defense, and in the words of Steve Jobs, is getting “flummoxed.”

And they should be. Why? Because comparisons to Android’s strong competitive effort in the smartphone realm hide the fact that in the media player realm — arguably the closer analog to the iPad’s domain — Android is a total non-entity. This speaks to the simple fact that when you remove the artificial “pull” of mobile carriers from the media/tablet realm, Android devices are hosed.

Maybe “artificial” is an unfair adjective. Android was, I believe, designed with the phone market in mind — and thus designed with the pull of the carriers in mind. But count me in with Sigal on the big picture: the iPad is more like the iPod than the iPhone, and that’s bad news for Android.

★ Wednesday, 16 March 2011