Market Segments

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!

HP TouchPad, coming to a Woot.com near you?

Let’s just put it out there. How is HP’s TouchPad going to rise above the rest in this maelstrom tablet market? If you look at the different strategies available to HP, the choices are few. They could take a page out of RIM’s Playbook and tightly couple the TouchPad to WebOS phones, but this limits their appeal to loyal Palm customers, an unfortunately shrinking population. The other potential is to pull from Apple’s fruit basket and provide an experience so compelling that people will be drawn into the WebOS ecosystem. After all, this is how Apple won hearts and minds with the iPod. People actually purchased Macs based on their iPod experience.

So how can HP use the TouchPad as a gateway drug into the WebOS ecosystem? Phil McKinney has been touting that the TouchPad will be transformative for the enterprise. Based on our data here at Argus Insights, they may have a chance. As people discuss their tablet usage, only the Playbook and the occasional Windows 7 Tablets evoke notions of “professional” use. Notice below how the topic of “work” compares across usage modes for tablet users.

Just yesterday I presented at the Northern California Association for Strategic Planning June meeting with the punch line of what HP needs to provide with the TouchPad experience in order to pull ahead of the fray…

The TouchPad has to be playfully serious

Even the enterprise-focused Playbook has web surfing as its most mentioned use

case with games mentioned above professional usage. Tablets mimic our smartphones more than our laptops from that point of view. The need for an Angry Birds fix has extended to larger Tablet screens. As such the TouchPad has to enable users to work hard and play harder!

The Surfing Experience must mimic the laptop, not the smartphone

iPad users continue to lambast Apple for the lack of Flash support on the iOS browser. (Trust me, we have the evidence. Just ask!) Given the larger screen of tablets, user expectations are shaped by their laptop usage more than their smartphone. One of the key marketing features being touted by Android tablets is their Flash support. Tablet users expect that browsing the web on a tablet should look like, well, the web, not some gossamer threads of the web viewed through the peephole of the smartphone screen.

Plan for multiple users. Tablet’s aren’t personal

Unlike laptops and smartphones, tablets are increasingly becoming group computing devices. “Hey dear, toss me the iPad. I want to look something up real fast.” “Mom, can Candice and I play Angry Birds on your Iconia?” HP has the opportunity to add personas to the TouchPad so that the device tailors its experience to the user who happens to hold it. This could be a huge source of delight for families if they also improve the stickiness of the WebOS experience as HP seeks to win over consumers.

The TouchPad will determine if HP + Palm > Apple. We all are watching with baited breath to see if the TouchPad shows up in our homes or on Woot.com.*

*At Argus Insights we view Woot.com and other deal-a-day sites to indicate whether or not a particular device has “Jumped the shark.” Argus Insights does not endorse any third-party products or services.

Take me to your Reader!

eReaders are getting a ton of press lately, and for good reason. Turns out people still like to read literature longer than 140 characters. While Kindle has made many people leave their dead trees at home, tablets have turned out to be a hidden favorite for eBook publishers and fans alike. In today’s post, we’ll take a shallow dive into how tablets are being used for book consumption.

My personal experience with eBooks started with Stanza on my iPhone. My wife became so concerned with her bleary-eyed husband that I received a Kindle over the holidays. It’s my constant companion on trips and even when dropping the kids off at school. The display is fantastic and easy on the eyes. Though I shudder when I do it, I still read content on my other devices, smartphone, and laptop included. Tablets offer similar levels of multi-tasking accessibility and are widely regarded as the “swiss army knife” of personal computing. They can do a lot of useful things when you need it even though specialized tools would serve you better. Given the broad utility, many people keep their tablet with them always and, in contrast to your swiss army knife, you can take it on the airplane with you.

Question is, for tablets, is the eBook experience the corkscrew (seldom used, but much talked about) or the scissors (not the reason you bought it, but the most-used feature) of the overall tablet experience?

We at Argus Insights can answer that question. Below

you’ll find our Segmented Attribute Funnel™ for the various tablet usage scenarios.

eBooks rank as the 4th most popular usage based on how customers share what’s important to their tablet experience. This puts eBooks out of corkscrew territory and squarely into the scissors category. If you look across the sentiment segments you find that even people that don’t care for their tablet (the No, AND segment) find that eBooks are still something to crow about. It’s interesting for the tablet market that users would rather curl up with a piece of aluminum and glass rather than listen to their favorite music.

The tablet is the latest device in the battle for convergence in consumer electronics. As we can see from the data, like swiss army knives, these devices converge around different usage scenarios based on what customers are looking to do and the device capabilities. Dedicated eReaders may still have a place in this market but with a different flavor of convergence where eBooks are their “big blade” and web surfing becomes their corkscrew. Argus will start covering eReaders in the coming weeks to answer that question as we rely on user wisdom to decide which experiences deliver on the promises of delight.

The Grass is Greener on the other side of the cell network

This just in, Verizon iPhone customers are happier with their experience than AT&T iPhone customers. While not a big surprise, the surprise is in just how big the difference is!

We recently completed an analysis of the Experience Equity for iPhone and RIM handsets. We were repeated the Stanford research that found strong correlation between Experience Equity and sales using Gartner’s Smartphone market update (more on the results of that analysis on a later post). There was a significant increase in iPhone reviews

starting in Q1 of this year. After digging deeper, we found most of the reviews were coming from Verizon iPhone users. It turns out that AT&T does not allow customers to review iPhones on their site. Because it is the only device you cannot review, we speculate that something in the Apple/AT&T agreement precluded AT&T from publishing user reviews on their site.

To ensure we were comparing apples to apples (or in this case Apples to BlackBerries), we pulled the Verizon data from the iPhone data so we would use the same data sources throughout the analysis and for both markets (turns out the results are the same with the Verizon data in or out). We were shocked to find how much the iPhone delight scores dropped when we pulled Verizon from the mix. After plotting the Verizon data separately, you can immediate see why that was the case. The Verizon iPhone user delight levels were roughly 80% higher than the baseline iPhone users.

Let’s repeat that just for emphasis. The Verizon iPhone experience is rated 80% higher than the AT&T experience. Turns out making quality phone calls really does matter to smartphone users…

iPad has its nose in the Enterprise Tent. Asus is already having tea inside.

We recently did a post on the rapid consumerization of the enterprise, starting by looking how the semiconductor industry traded the boom and bust cycles of the enterprise market in for the more “consistent” cycles of the consumer market. Now we are seeing consumer grade tech invade the enterprise like a locust swarm. This latest revolution has been driven by Apple and the iPhone. While Blackberries remain the badge of “serious” business, the iPhone rapidly was snatched up by CEO and janitors alike, rapidly becoming the badge of “cool” business. The sprouting of hundreds of walled gardens of Apples inside the corporate firewall has driven CIO’s sleepless and insane as they struggle to maintain the paradoxical duality of Sarbanes-Oxley mandated information access & control paradigm cohabitation with the “let’s mix our sales forecast numbers with Angry Birds high scores” world of iPhone and Android devices.

We’ve seen Apple and Google both make concessions for the enterprise customers attempting to extend the consumer lifestyles into the “business formal” parts of their day. But this was smartphones, devices that worked mainly as conduits to colleagues through voice and email. Occasionally users would attempt to review and mark up documents on the tiny screen. Once finished this lilliputian task, these users would immediately dial-up their optometrist to be treated for eye strain.

Tablets, yes tablets, are a different matter entirely. Now you have a comparatively larger screen that grants the magic ability to do more than passively consumer content. Tablet users can now actively engage with these devices for the critique and creation of content. Those CIO’s that survived the first wave of consumer smartphones washing over their SOX levies and now looking at the rising flood waters of tablet use and hitting the speed dial for their therapists. When will these waters of tablet use

in the enterprise overflow the carefully built dykes of security anytime soon?

Yes they will. Our information on tablet usage is showing an increasing number of iPad and iPad 2 users are leveraging these constantly connected windows of wonder for their day jobs. As you can see in the Attribute Funnels below for the iPad and iPad2, “work” ranks as the 9th most common activity users mention as they share their experiences with others. What’s interesting is that, even between product generations, roughly 5% of all iPad/iPad2 users are utilizing it for some sort of professional use.

Now contrast this with the ASUS Eee Slate. Users of this trim little Windows 7 device rank professional activity as their top usage, with over 12% of users making mention specifically of work activities. Remember our nervous CIO’s from above? They love the Eee Slate. It’s an OS they already support, able to run applications they already have control over. This is a product that fits needly into the existing corporate ecosystem and this message comes across from the users.

So the question on the table is, given the increasing availability of enterprise/CIO friendly tablets, with the nose of the iPad’s eventually make it all the way into the tent of the modern enterprise or will employees be increasingly asked to leave their toys at home.

What do you think?