The "inadequate" Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 at the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona. Photo: Charlie Sorrel
Samsung’s mobile VP Lee Don-Joo has taken a look at the iPad 2 and decided that his own Galaxy Tab 10.1 isn’t up to scratch. “We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,” he told the Korean Yonhap news agency.
Further, Samsung was planning to sell the 10-inch Tab for more than the seven-incher, but that too has changed. “[W]e will have to think that over,” said Lee.
When I tried out the Tab 10.1 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month, it seemed like a plastic toy with a gorgeous screen. Its “superior” specs turned out to be squeezed in so they could be marked off on a feature checklist.
The camera is terrible, the Android Honeycomb OS feels like an old-timey desktop OS, and the plastic body may make it light, but it also makes it feel cheap. Obviously Samsung was building down to a price.
Now that the iPad 2 has slimmed down and added cameras and a faster, dual-core processor, even those hardware differences have evaporated. This will be worrying not just for Samsung, but for Motorola and all the other tablet-makers trying to make a dent in Apple’s market. Expect a lot of pre-announced tablets to mysteriously disappear.
Lee’s words are telling. These companies are doing all they can to compete with the iPad, but — as Steve Jobs said at the launch event on Wednesday — they’re making PCs. And nobody is buying them, because iPad buyers don’t care about megapixels and CPU clock-speeds.
A final remark from Lee sums up the bewilderment these companies must be feeling. “Apple made it very thin,” he said.
Samsung sees iPad 2’s thinness, price as challenges [Yonhap News Agency via Physorg]
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