Hasta La Gadget!

T-Mobile drops Samsung Galaxy Tab to $350 on-contract originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s 7-inch tablet isn’t “dead on arrival” after all. In fact, Samsung has sold more than a million of them in less than two months.

Released in mid-October, the Galaxy Tab is the first serious contender to Apple’s iPad. It sports a 7-inch touchscreen and runs a modified version of Google’s Android operating system.

“I can confirm 1M Galaxy Tabs sold globally,” a Samsung spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.

Holy moley. That’s not too far away from the iPad, which sold 1 million units in just 28 days. And it’s a number that should have Steve Jobs eating his hat after he ruthlessly derided 7-inch tablets during an earnings call.

“Seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad,” Jobs said. “These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival.”

So much for that.

The Galaxy Tab’s hot sales show that the tablet category has plenty of room for competition and growth. 2010 was truly the year the tablet became mainstream after several flops in the past, thanks to the success of the iPad.

See Also:

• Samsung’s Galaxy Tab: iPad’s First Solid Contender
• Samsung Galaxy Tab Garners Favorable Reviews
• Official: Samsung Galaxy Tab $600 on Verizon

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Our supply checks say that 10 out of 10 analysts are insanely bullish about tablets — despite the fact that there are only 2.5 competitive products on the market, and one of them only came out a month ago. So, naturally, it isn’t difficult to scrounge up sales predictions that show the tablet rocketing into the stratosphere, cutting into PC market share, while also expanding the market outright to accommodate its post-PC ways. Gartner‘s guess is 55 million tablets next year, while IDC has a more conservative estimate of 42 million, but both predict a sharp, exponential rise in the following years, and IDC takes it one step further: 18 months from now, combined smartphone and tablet sales will eclipse the PC, it claims, with both categories hovering in the mid-400 million range.

Now, that number is mostly smartphones, which isn’t an unprecedented shift in and of itself — the PC took a major hit in popularity in Japan once the kids got ahold of these newfangled phone things — but overall it represents a shift from the open-ended, flexible, and powerful PC to the narrow, task-specific, app-driven nature of the iOS and Android kind. Or you could spin it the completely opposite way: people need phones, so they buy a nice phone. No PC death knell in that behavior, and the tablet is still a very niche product with some good PR. Either way, we’ll be much more impressed with this sort of market battle when it’s the tablet (perhaps with a little help from the smartbook or netbook-lite category) going up against the Windows and Mac PC head-on, without smartphones shouldering most of the load.

Combined sales of smartphones and tablets to surpass the humble PC in 18 months, says IDC originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wondering just how well a tablet would do if picked up and marketed by all four major carriers in America? We’re still waiting for the breakdown within our borders, but there’s hardly a doubt that the unprecedented carrier arrangement has helped Samsung shatter its estimates on Galaxy Tab sales. Purportedly, the outfit has just passed the one million mark in global sales of the 7-inch Android tablet, but Information Week is quick to point out that Sammy’s not clear on whether that’s units in the sales channel or units in the hands of consumers. Either way, one million’s nothing to scoff at, particularly when you consider that only 600,000 had been sold as of November 22nd. The firm’s now hoping to move 1.5 million of ’em by the year’s end, and while that’s still well short of the estimated seven million iPads that have been sold to date, it’s a sales rate that we’re sure no one at Samsung is kvetching about.

Update: CNET heard from a Samsung representative that the company hasn’t officially announced the sales figure here, but hopefully we’ll get some clarification soon. It’s possible that the PR team simply isn’t ready to dish out the number in official fashion yet. We’ll keep you posted.

Update II: So, it’s just what we expected — the numbers are real, but Samsung wasn’t quite ready to come clean with ’em. According to Kim Titus, Director of Public Relations for Samsung Mobile, the company has “sold one million Galaxy Tabs globally.” Good on ’em!

Samsung sells one million Galaxy Tab units (update: confirmed) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Dec 2010 11:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you read tech news today, expect to see a story making the rounds concerning a “consumer poll” rating the iPad versus the Galaxy Tab. According to the report, an “overwhelming majority” of consumers prefer Apple’s tablet over its nearest Android competitor — a whopping 85 percent of those queried felt the iPad had a higher perceived value than the Tab. Sounds shocking, right? Except there’s one small problem. The “survey” (and really, you have to use the term loosely here) consisted of 65 people. Let’s just say that again: 65 respondents. That’s problem number one.

Problem number two is that the survey was conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who is not only using a bizarre and somewhat useless metric like “perceived value” to judge these devices, but is also known for wildly miscalculating sales numbers and expectations for Apple products. In fact, Gene Munster should probably be close to the top of the most wanted list for irresponsible analysts. Some of his famous misses? Take the wildly speculative report that Apple would sell 5.6m iPads in 2010 (a baseless prediction which he quickly reassessed to more reasonable digits… the day after the device’s launch), or the prediction that Apple would build its own search engine (so far so good!), and of course, Gene’s news that Apple will have an HDTV on the market by 2011. Did we mention the $1,000 AAPL stock price call? No? Okay.

So this latest report, in which Gene apparently just polled the families living on his block, seems beyond disingenuous. The margin of error on a group of 65 people is so high that it makes the results of the iPad vs. Galaxy Tab study all but meaningless, and further demonstrates the insidious, dangerous power of some analysts and their fantasy football stock manipulations. The moral of the story? Next time you see the names Gene and Munster in the same sentence, don’t just take the news with a grain of salt — use the whole shaker.

Update: Piper Jaffray analyst Andrew Murphy (one of the other researchers on this report) got in touch and gave us some background on the sourcing and methodology for finding respondents. In his words:

The respondents were chosen randomly on their way in/out of a large national retail chain. After spending time with each device, they were asked which they’d prefer and what a reasonable price for each would be.

It’s worth noting that that information is found nowhere in the report itself, nor is any other detail provided (type of store, geographic location, age / socioeconomic background, etc.), though this charming section is included:

Research Disclosures

Piper Jaffray was making a market in the securities of Apple, Inc. at the time this research report was published. Piper Jaffray will buy and sell Apple, Inc. securities on a principal basis.

55 people think the iPad is more valuable than the Galaxy Tab (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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