July 2011

Would you like a Tablet with your Big Gulp Slurpee?

Tablets are becoming commodities fast. This makes the rapid drop in laptop prices over the last five years look like glacial erosion. These multi-user windows to the web are currently nothing more than a display, touchscreen, radio, processor, and storage. With the choice of experiences dwindling to just Android or iOS (both Playbook and TouchPad failed to delight the market) the differentiation opportunities are draining away just as fast.

In a mad dash to introduce their own tablets to the iPad-crazed market, mobile phone and PC OEMs alike have stumbled over each other in what they believed was a race of speeds and feeds. When will they learn?

Apple wins by presenting a novel experience built on solid technology (not always rock-solid, but good enough to enable the desired experience). Motorola committed the cardinal sin of competing with Apple when they launched the Xoom. Not only did they launch with a higher price than the iPad (maybe if we price it as a luxur

y, people will believe it’s better), their marketing only promised speeds and feeds.

Tablets are not about speed. They are about casual time, surfing, reading, watching an episode of Glee, or challenging yourself to a game (or ten) of Fruit Ninja. These are not high-powered (mental or electrical) activities. Angry Birds is not about speed, it’s about stickiness. If the birds were in 3D with 5.1 surround sound, it wouldn’t change the stickiness of the experience.

While most everyone is missing this, HP is trying. Phil Mckinney has some marvelous views of a future where we all can enjoy HP products, but the TouchPad was not the right stepping stone to the future people expected. OEMs must (1) paint a compelling view of the everyday consumer in a starring role AND (2) provide the tools to achieve, with ease, part of that future today.

Tablets are the new cupholder of this millennium–you must have one. And it’s okay if it sucks… as long as it holds a slurpee.

Five Acers Beats a Flush

Argus Insights’ analysis of the tablet market continues to show interesting results that are not so easily noticeable in the marketplace. As we add new tablets to our data set, we gain greater insight into how these products perform. With this new data, we can make firm predictions about a product’s failure or success. As always, some products buck the trends. In the tablet market that underdog is Acer’s Android-based Iconia tablet series.

Wait, what? Acer makes tablets? And they’re good?

Not only does Acer make a tablet (they’ve actually released five models during this tablet craze), users love it for one reason—PRICE. With the Android tablet experience appearing so similar across devices, consumers now differentiate these devices on price.

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The data above indicates that across key attributes, Acer’s Iconia Tablet receives nearly the same sentiment levels as the Motorola Xoom. The key difference between the Iconia and other tablets is the positive perception of the Iconia’s Price/Value.

This price differentiation reflects a lack of maturity in the tablet market:

The price/cost of tablet devices does not reflect the value that users receive from the devices. The usefulness of tablets has not extended beyond what can presently be done with laptops and smartphones, and therefore will continue to be seen as a luxury/fun purchase.
There is not enough differentiation to force purchase choices toward particular products.

While the average consumer may have seen Acer products in stores, few are aware of the value that the Taiwanese manufacturer brings to the US market: quality products comparable to marquis brands offered at affordable prices. In recent years, they have become more consumer-facing and less component-focused, raising the profile of their products here in the US. Those of us who are very aware of what we get from Acer know that the Iconia is the choice for great functionality and aesthetics at a price point that beats top brands. In the tablet space, or more specifically the crowded Android tablet sub-space, Acer provides greater delight to its users simply because the experience costs less than the competitors’.

Acer’s Iconia tablets are not iPad killers. They are, however, an economical standout in a crowded and homogenous tablet market. Will Acer make a big splash in the market? We’ll see, but they are happy to steal Android-based tablet market share from heavy hitters like Samsung and Motorola.

Don't touch this? TouchPad Update

The market has voted. Consumers recommend not touching the TouchPad with a ten foot pole. The Touchpad has had the fastest decline in delight we’ve seen, ever, in the Tablet market. Within two weeks of launch, it went from being one of the highest rated experiences in the market to one of the lowest.

The question is “why?”. There are all sorts of pundits talking about their high hopes for the TouchPad experience, especially as a potential ecosystem alternative to the iPad. Based on what we’re seeing in our data from actual users, HP failed to execute on the basics. Across the board, the top usage scenario for Tablets is content consumption, typically in the order of Web Surfing, Movies, Games, Books, and Music. Here’s how the TouchPad usage stacks up:

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Notice that on the features that matter most, users, even those that love the TouchPad, are not hot on it’s ability to support content consumption. What’s even more telling is where enterprise usage ranked. The TouchPad was supposed to be THE tablet for the busy professional, providing rock solid enterprise support. Professional usage, “Work” ranked 9th of overall usage topics mentioned with a net negative sentiment across the board. This means the TouchPad not only didn’t measure up the expectations of the core Tablet market, but also missed the mark for the core niche they were aimed on delighting.

Luckily HP has an advantage over their competition–Web OS. Overall, the OS was a source of delight for consumers, though the lack of Apps within the WebOS ecosystem continues to be an issue. If they leverage the over-the-air capabilities they pioneered with the Palm Pre, then disgruntled users may find an improved experience.

HP TouchPad, Leader of the Pack?

Over the jam-packed holiday weekend, a large number of people were unboxing the new HP TouchPad tablet. Argus Insight’s early results show that the HP TouchPad is now the highest-rated Tablet experience in the market today, beating out the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ (which has a larger display than iPad). Though we have some initial results below based on four days of data, we’ll report back to see if HP has hit or missed the mark for our must-have UX attributes.

We can already compare the first four days of TouchPad experience data to that of other tablets. While we tend to share our data on a timeline, we can also compare these experiences based on the product launch date. It turns out that products are similar to rockets. You can determine their success or failure pretty soon after launch. While we lack the telemetry information of modern space flight for products, Argus Insights’ algorithms do a good job of sizing up the potential impact that a product has on a market.

Below is the Buzz Landscape for the leading tablets available today. What’s different from the evidence we have shared in the past is that this is based on “days from launch” rather than calendar days. This means we can compare the launch profiles of these products to see how they compare over time. There’s a lot here, but we’ll focus solely on the TouchPad today, leaving other juicy insights for later.

Long Distance Love Guide

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The TouchPad has a respectful start, ahead in both buzz and delight against the Xoom and iPad. The Galaxy Tab has a stronger start, but falls off quickly. Notice that the TouchPad’s buzz levels are muted in comparison to some competition. Competing as it was against Transformers: Dark of the Moon, we feel that the holidays dampened the normal reviewing behavior of consumers (we’ve seen the same seasonality effects around other holidays where people share after they’ve recovered from their revelry).

Switching gears to a different view, the Rating Velocity Landscape, we see a different dynamic playing out in the market.

The Cumulative Rating Velocity is another view of how the buzz volume changes over time. Most products tend to fall over time, owing to slowing market interest. Every now and then you see a product that increases in rating over time due to a growing number of people engaging with the product. The Acer Iconia Tab (Android) is that product in the Tablet Market today. HP could follow a similar pattern, but it’s too soon to tell. We’ll have better information next week after the effects of the holiday weekend have had a chance to dampen out. If our view that the holiday weekend impacted the TouchPad results is false, then the HP TouchPad has already started its slow slide to Woot.com-dom.

For the sake of the market, we hope we’re wrong!