Report: Tablet Sales Will Top 4 Million in 2010
Posted on 03. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in News
Computerworld is touting a recent report released by ABI Research, Inc. predicts that tablet sales will be over four million this year, and by 2015 will be at 57 million sold per year. That seems to me like a huge number of devices sold in a market that barely exists. Yet.
ABI is defining a tablet as a device that is between five and eleven inches, has wi-fi and video capability. That certainly fits into the Apple iPad and Chrome OS tablet specifications perfectly. The interest in these devices is high, but we shall see whether this amount of tablets are actually sold. The major concern for a tablet is how much in terms of creation you will really be able to do. Without a keyboard or other input devices such as a camera (for now) the iPad along with other low-cost tablets popping up in the news are lacking the tools needed in order to create content for the web and otherwise.
That begs the question: are users going to be hooking up an assortment of other devices to tablets in order to make them function more like a regular PC? If that were the case, it would totally defeat the purpose of even having a tablet in the first place. Of course with Apple, they control the hardware specifications of the iPad, and can limit the number of ports thus the number of accessories that could be attached. Expect to see Google, which has already been adamant about Chrome OS hardware specifications, to do the same thing.
While this technology seems interesting, I’m not completely convinced that a tablet fills a specific need that I have unless it is for quick information retrieval. In that case, the device better be pretty low-cost.
