Lenovo Claims Samsung Galaxy Tab Sold Just 20,000 202
An anonymous reader writes "Andrew Barrow, director of consumer products for Lenovo Western Europe, claims that the original Galaxy Tab only sold 20,000 out of one million shipped. He goes on to say Samsung was 'channel stuffing' in order to generate publicity and become known as a major Android tablet manufacturer."
wasn't aware of that term (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia,
Sounds analogous to the common practice in the book-publishing industry of quoting "100,000 copies shipped" or whatever, which may or may not bear much relationship to how many books have been sold. In fact, some of the strange practices in book retailing, like publishers' willingness to give a credit to bookstores for unsold books without even having them returned, are in part aimed at making it easier to shovel a bunch of books down the distribution channels.
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You only see this with mass-market paperbacks. It's not standard practice to warehouse old mass-markets, and having the bookstore destroy them makes more sense than paying to ship them back to the publisher so that the publisher can destroy them. The bookstore is required to rip off the front cover and send it back and has signed a contract that the
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Thats just one tier. Book publishers also work closely with the chains (at least the large ones) to liquidate those hardcovers at extremely low prices before they resort to destroying them.
If you walk into a bookstore, you will notice that is very common.
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i.e. how to sell hundreds of thousands of cars
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everyone does it. i remember years ago AMD got slammed for doing it. they "shipped" a lot of CPU's in one quarter for some good revenue numbers and the next quarter they took a charge to take them all back.
very easy to catch too. wall street analysts hit the malls on weekends and ask the sales drones about sales or just watch foot traffic. then they plug the numbers into their models and get some estimated sales figures
The flip side works too (Score:2)
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Sounds like what the scientologists did when their messiah (may he rest in peace with Xenu) wrote a new book.
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In Sony's defense, they truthfully expected the launch to have much higher demand, and the supplies to not meet said demand. They seriously overestimated the sales of the device and I cant blame them. Historically, popular consoles suffer scarcity at launch, the PS1 and PS2 included. Add to it a heavily undercut BlueRay pricing for the time and they had all the reasons.
No businessman would ever blame them, since based of research and precedents, feature sets and "packed value", they had all the reasons in t
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How much did a BlueRay cost at the time, though? I myself still don't own that because I do agree: the price was insane. But had I cared at all about BlueRay, I would had considered it to be a darn good deal.
For a lot of people, the PS2 was their first DVD player. Sony thought the same would hold true for the PS3 and BlueRay. The only thing they overestimated was the population's interest in BlueRay technology. Very few actually care for it.
A good businessman should be able to spot where the error was, in r
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Anyone with any sense could have foreseen how weak BlueRay demand would be. This wasn't a massive paradigm shift like VHS->DVD. In the eyes of consumers, BR is a minor bump up from DVD. At the time, I would argue it was less than that given the minuscule inroads HDTV had made into living rooms. Only fanboys and AV nerds cared.
And? (Score:2)
Does anyone other than Samsung and Lenovo really care?
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone considering making applications for tablets might be interested in how many tablets of a given type have made it into the hands of consumers (e.g. people who might buy there apps).
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No. The original Galaxy Tab runs Froyo or Gingerbread, so no one will actually target it specifically. It runs Android phone software.
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The subset of software for Android that is suitable for tablets but not for phones is targeting Honeycomb, since that's where the APIs are. Owners of the original Galaxy Tab are SOL, at least until Google publishes the source code for Honeycomb (which is unlikely) or Ice Cream Sandwich (hopefully soon).
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Does anyone other than Samsung and Lenovo really care?
Speaking as somebody who owns an iPad, I would love to see something like the Tab (which is pretty nice, actually) light a fire under Apple to try even harder.
Let's get some competition going.
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Speaking as somebody who owns an iPad, I would love to see something like the Tab (which is pretty nice, actually) light a fire under Apple to try even harder
Oh, you mean like the Galaxy tab 10.1?
Incidentally, I use both my Xoom and my mother's iPad 2 and I can state that the Xoom just blows the ipad out of the water in usability, contrary to the usual spin from Apple cultists. For example, playing videos on the Youtube app, the video position slider just fails to respond without repeated attempts. And several times I have picked up Mom's ipad to find all the icons jiggling. My mom put it down because she could not figure out how to get it to start doings stuff
of course ... as people have been saying all along (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't be as or almost as expensive as the real thing (iPad) and *not* be the real thing. If they would sell the device at $200, it might have a chance. But for anywhere close to the price of an iPad, everybody is just going to buy the iPad, which is far more polished and comes with many more real tablet apps (not ported phone apps) and the app store.
If people can get more quality for the same price, they generally will. This is why Apple sells every single iPad it can produce, and knockoff products d
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I'm thinking the Color Nook is about the best Android Tablet out there for the money.
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Thing is, the iPad's been out about - what, nearly 18 months now? I reckon if anyone was able to make and sell a similar tablet for $200, they'd have done so by now.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that unless you commit to millions of units (a hell of a risk when nobody has been able to emulate Apple's success to date), it is not physically possible to manufacture a tablet for much less than US$300. By the time you add on the profit margin for distributors and retailers - particularly bricks & mort
Re:of course ... as people have been saying all al (Score:5, Insightful)
In contrast to their past history, Apple is not selling at a much higher margin over manufacturing costs (or they have lower costs) vs generic competitors.
This makes it very, very difficult to displace an iPad.
This is brilliantly done by Apple and a real problem for Android tablets: who is making any money ? Google is making a bit of money from the ads in the Google apps and the Android market, meanwhile the hardware vendors because of Apple's sharp margin on the iPad and because they don't control their platform are making nothing. It's a repeat of the PC market with Google playing Microsofts' role, only without the golden decade during the boom years. Amazon seems to be the only one who gets it: cut the tablet down as much as possible to make it cheaper, market to your existing customer base, create your own ecosystem with store etc. and tell Google "so long and thanks for all the fish." They'll be the first ones making serious money of off an Android tablet.
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The reason why Apple is able to sell at rather low prices is because they know they can sell those things, so they make massive, multi-year preorders of components - screens, CPUs etc - and economy of scale kicks in. Whereas Android tablet manufacturers have no certainty that they can even sell a million of their devices within a year.
That said, it's still possible to beat iPad on price. E.g. Asus Transformer is still selling $100 cheaper.
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No, he's right. Plenty of people won't buy from Apple, and for good reason.
What is plenty of people? 20,000? 100,000? There might be even more who don't buy any tablets simply because they are too broke ass poor.
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Millions. Just like there are millions of people avoiding Microsoft Windows. But sure, of the nearly 7 billion people on the planet, most won't afford an iPad. Then again, it's only sold 30-something million units, a comparably negligible number.
Where are they now? (Score:2)
That means there's 980,000 Galaxy tablets out there nobody wants.
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Time for a 99 monetary unit going out of business sale. For that price I'd buy two 'roid tablets.
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Remember those "high return rates" rumors Samsung denied?
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Let's hope Samsung doesn't need to massively discount them because that market may just have been exhausted by the Touchpad firesale.
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But these run Android natively. No need to get Cyanogen to deal on it for you.
Seriously HP, you're a tool. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is regarded as the best Android tablet device as well. Hello HP, you had the number two position in your hands, even YOU sold more than that before the fire sale.
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And to bail out of the market the week before Jobs resigned? They're not just a tool, they're the whole toolbox.
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HP is one of the dumbest companies on the planet ever since Carly Fiorina stole the job. Her leaving just left the dopes who didn't quit when she got the gig.
It's been careening downhill ever since.
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Agilent seems to have sold off a lot of what was HP as well.
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A tablet lets me read your dumbshit comment very comfortably from my couch...wait now my kitchen...now back to the couch. I don't have a keyboard at an odd angle so typing is fairly comfortable.
I've got a netbook but I ended up really disappointed by the user experience. The trackpad was microscopic and didn't have multitouch capabilities. The keyboard is very flimsy so typing is a pain. Worst is the UI is completely unfriendly on such a small screen. Even running Ubuntu instead on Windows didn't help on th
Re:Seriously HP, you're a tool. (Score:5, Informative)
Lenovo is referring to the fail 7 inch original Galaxy Tab running Android 2.2. Not the Honeycomb tablet. This is because Lenovo made their own tablet running Android 2.3, in that same 7 inch form factor.
Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 is doing just fine.
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This is why I chose a Dell 5" Streak personally. It fits in my pocket and its very slim too. With Android 2.2 its still lacking the ability to use its front-facing camera in many chat programs (sigh) but its a great device I get asked frequently about.
Unfortunately, Dell stopped selling them but Sony's doing a 5.5" clamshell tablet so that'll be interesting.
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The primary reason I have no interest in the smaller tablets is because my Android phone already has a 4.3" screen. If I were to get a tablet I'd want something iPad sized because otherwise I might as well just use the phone I'm already carrying around.
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The point of 7" tablets is that they are light enough to hold with one hand conveniently for long periods of time (like books). iPad, at 600g, can be held that way, but not for long, unless you find some support for your hand. For comparison, 7" Galaxy Tab is 380g, and the upcoming new Samsung's 7" tablet with OLED screen will be 330g. Kindle 3 is 240g.
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Makes me think that without Apple's iWant factor there isn't much demand for tablets. Most people already have a smartphone.
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This still sold more, so they have that feather in their cap at least.
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BestBuy got 250,000 units and reported to only sell 25,000. That was just BestBuy. Those sales alone made them have a higher final sales count. Add whatever Staples and other chains sold and you would have the TouchPad performing perhaps at least 50% better than the GalaxyTap
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Sorry someone thought that it was worth posting something relevant in this thread and offended you
Copying Microsoft's tactic? (Score:3, Interesting)
When MS released the Win Phone 7 they counted the retail sales, the devices setting on retail shelves, the devices in the retail channel, the devices on manufacturer's inventory shelves and, apparently, the devices being made at the time. All to make it appear that the WP7 was enjoying greater success than it actually was.
Of course, we are assuming that Lenovo is telling the truth which, along with ethics, seems to be scarce commodities in business these days.
So, is Lenovo selling anything? (Score:2)
I'm trying to work out the point of this mud slinging.
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Lenovo definitively has an interest in this going out, as do most Android manufacturers. Some may fear the information coming out may hurt overall Android Tablet popularity, but truth is, if the public thinks only Samsung is able to "ship" large numbers of tablets and "sell them", that then perhaps only Samsung Tablets are worthwhile, hurting drastically any competing Android Tablet manufacturer.
Another point of issue is the stores themselves may stop accepting more than a couple units of any other brand du
New LePad launch? (Score:2)
There is no way that Samsung sold only 20,000 of the original Galaxy Tab. There are more than that number sold in the UK alone.
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Source of this information? Also keep in mind that he was specifically talking about the original 7" Galaxy Tab, the one Samsung said was selling through "quite smooth" but refused to reveal numbers for.
I do find it interesting he made his callout specific to this model and didn't say anything about the 10.5" model. If he has his hand on that information, it would had been nice to know the sell numbers for that model too.
And Lenovo would know? (Score:2)
I wonder... (Score:2, Informative)
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...if Apple's injunction against Samsung has anything to do with there supposedly only being 20,000 out of a million units sold?
No. It is a different tablet. Apple couldn't quite claim that customers would confuse a 7" Samsung tablet with a 10" Apple tablet.
Ever seen one? Do the math ... (Score:2)
I don't mean at Fry's. I mean, in use. Not at a tech conference, but among the typical, everday, consumer.
I've never seen a 7" Galaxy Tab.
As of June, Apple has supposedly sold 25M iPads [unwiredview.com]. 1M Tabs? That means for every 25 iPads I saw "in the wild", I'd expect to see at least 1 tab.
For fun sake, let's assume they sold 25,000. That means I'd at least see 1 for every 1000 iPads. I know I've seen at least 1000 iPads - probably 2-3 times that means. Not a single 7" Tab. (I've seen one 10", and I've seen one Xoom,
Don't buy it (Score:2)
Living in Korea, I've seen them fairly regularly. Koreans will let nationalism colour their purchases, and you can buy the tab here on a payment plan from various shops. So it's not that hard to get. The same goes for MP3 players, while I rarely saw anything but iPods in North America, at the same time that I came to Korea, an on the street estimate would have put their market share at only around 10%.
Now a lot of people are using their phones (which are often iPhones, but just as often not).
Also Samsung cl
iPad entrenchment, and Android pricing (Score:3)
Android tablet makers don't seen to understand that, with the iPad being used by law enforcement, and hospitals, and all. Nobody needs an Android table that costs just as an iPad.
So where are they? (Score:3)
You'd think there'd have been some really significant discounting in the channels if there were a million sitting in warehouses. There were some brief offers on the original Tab, but there was no fire sale. Presumably Samsung would have an interest in getting them in people's hands rather than simply scrapping them. It would be an expensive - and unimaginative - way to protect brand reputation.
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A far less expensive "clone" would have a shot, but currently Android tablets are not clones, they are 'alternatives'. ( not saying they are better or worse, just they are not the same and people seem to want Apples at this point )
Re:History repeats itself (Score:4, Insightful)
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The latest "iPod/iPhone/iPad-killer" turns out to be a flop.
You're confused. They're talking about the original Galaxy Tab - the 7" Android 2.2 tablet that came out last year. It was rather meh by all accounts, which was accurately captured by reviews and user feedback. I don't think anyone seriously considered it an "iPad killer".
The current model is Galaxy Tab 10.1, a 10" Honeycomb tablet - and that offers some serious competition to iPad.
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Are you seriously suggesting Apple was first to release a tablet device with a touch screen?
Name the prior ones. Describe them. Were they decent multi-touch? Touch at all or just stylus? What kind of processor? What OS? What resolution & color depth screen? How thick? How heavy? Battery life? What was the price? How many apps were available?
Uh-huh, I thought so.
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The problem with handwriting recognition is twofold. First, it's actually a really hard problem (hell, humans have problem recognising my handwriting, what chance do machines have?). The second is that a pen is actually a pretty poor input device for text. I can type a lot faster than I can write with a pen, and the result is always consistent, while with a pen it can vary in quality depending on a whole variety of factors.
That said, the Newton had some amazing technology. The UI for copy and paste w
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Actually Lenovo did some tablet versions of its laptops. The X40 and X60. Pentium mobile based, 12" screen, windows xp.
Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
windows xp
And that's where the epic fail resided before Apple came out with the iPad! An OS wholly unsuited for a tablet device! Only the tight integration of OS and hardware that Apple provided is what made a tablet computer a useful! Yes, not for all the same things as a laptop, but, partially the same things and some other things for which a laptop is not ideally suited, such as reading or watching video on a plane. I love my MacBook Pro, especially with MacPorts giving me a lot of the unix-y command-line tools that I love, but I would never use it or even a much smaller laptop (mine is 17") to replace my iPad for my lengthy bus rides or even on my plane rides. And yes, for me it is primarily a media consumption device and fantastic web browser. (I know, no Flash, and good riddance to it, too!) But, so what? The right thing for the right job is what I say. It may not work for you and I don't see it replacing my laptop for a long time, or even ever, but I get about 2 hours of solid use out of it every week day and for non-geeks, I am a programmer, it may well work as the only device they need. Especially when paired with a bluetooth keyboard.
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Sure, but that wasn't your question. Apple didn't invent tablets, they just figured out how to sell them to consumers outside of the niche markets that other manufacturers occupied.
Even on the OS front they basically put the iPhone OS on a bigger screen, and they were not the first to try it. The Nokia 770 pre-dates the iPad by years and runs an OS designed for phones. While Apple can claim that the iPhone was a real game changer (and kudos to them for it) the iPad was really just the next logical step on a
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Huh?
Sure, but that wasn't your question?
I didn't have any question! I believe the original (not mine) question was:
Who's cloning who? And who's the competitors again? Are you seriously suggesting Apple was first to release a tablet device with a touch screen? Go read a history book, fanboy. And scrape that tattoo off your arm.
And I would claim that Apple was not cloning anyone because they came up with the first OS that truly works well on a tablet. If you look at the numbers of iPads sold and compare that to the numbers of tablet computers sold before the iPad became available you'd have to live under a rock to not also call that "a real game changer"! I don't necessarily disagree that it might have been the "next logical step". But before I
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You forgot the most obvious Apple innovation, which fortunately is protected by a government-supported sole economic profit mandate (aka patent) 'till the tablets come home.
The real pertinent question to ask when trying to separate the chaff from the apples is: "Describe them. Did they have rectangular screens and rounded corners?"
If the answer to that question is "yes" they obviously stole all they ever came up with from Apple. It would not be the first time [google.com] that happened, after all.
apple were far from being first... (Score:2)
Apple were far from the first to invent the tablet, but what they did do was turn a niche market into a mass consumer product through a combination of producing up to date hardware running an OS and application suite that was widely accepted and popular. I could denigrate it to say it was simply an iPod/iPhone maxi, but the new form did allow it to be so much more.
Here's a couple of examples of tablets, I didn'
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First? no.... First commercialy successful tablet? absolutely
Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Success, if defined by meeting your sales goals, would have to go to Fujitsu. They've been making tablets for decades now. Most of them run Windows (either CE or X86), resistive touch or custom stylus.
They aren't sexy, but every 7-11 in the country (world?) has at least one for inventory control. People use them for work, not watching movies, so I guess they don't count.
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Niche product is niche product.
I suppose you could call a Telxon a handheld computer too. But it's a niche product too.
So no, Fujitsu's tablets aren't general purpose enough to count.
--
BMO
Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Consumer goods are a niche product.
Ever buy anything from Agilent?
No?
They sell a $7 billion a year in "niche" products.
Lots of consumer companies would love that sort of revenue.
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Niche product is niche product.
I suppose you could call a Telxon a handheld computer too. But it's a niche product too.
So no, Fujitsu's tablets aren't general purpose enough to count.
Hahaha. You are so dumb.
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They aren't sexy, but every 7-11 in the country (world?) has at least one for inventory control. People use them for work, not watching movies, so I guess they don't count.
Seriously? Every 7-11? So that's 40,000 units. Let's be generous and say there's two per store - that's 80,000. And let's say every hospital in the US has a hundred - since that's the only other place I've seen them. So that's roughly 600,000 units.
Apple has sold 69,000,000 iPads and iPad 2s.
The consumer market is different than the commercial market.
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Success, if defined by meeting your sales goals, would have to go to Fujitsu. They've been making tablets for decades now. Most of them run Windows (either CE or X86), resistive touch or custom stylus.
They aren't sexy, but every 7-11 in the country (world?) has at least one for inventory control. People use them for work, not watching movies, so I guess they don't count.
Sure they count, let's add them up: 40,000 stores, say 1 tablet every 2 years, round up: 0.5 million units in 20 years. It took Apple about two weeks to sell that many. Heck, people call the Apple TV a failure, and that sold over a million.
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The professionals used Betacam
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Yes, people just "hate" Apple and Microsoft for no valid reasons whatsoever. It's not "hate", it's simply being objective and not a F.F.F. (fruity fucking fanboy).
Right, because "reality" is that the iPad is a flop? Or that it's not the most successful tablet ever? Or that it wasn't the first truly successful tablet?
And how exactly is it that you can claim to be objective when you immediately follow that claim by stating those that disagree with you are "F.F.F. (fruity fucking fanboy)"? If you really had an objective argument, you should be able to defend it without such nonsense.
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Pfffff what do you have against fruit?
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I'm not sure what the author of that article was thinking, but that prototype was issued 6 months after the iPhone came out. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can't find an Android phone that existed in any form before the iPhone was released.
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it's not a legal limbo, it's just apple delaying tactic. apple wants 'em samsung fabbed soc's to apple?
one size fits all? like shoes? at least there's variety, though most of those models haven't shipped worldwide.
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No confusion, just more choices. I happily purchased one of the 7" Galaxy Tabs, and I have no regrets. I use it *every day*. I do, however, plan on getting one of the new Asus Transformers when they are released in October. Another non-Apple alternative that I'm happy exists.
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Just like there are too many TV's in various sizes, huh? What a moron.
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Saying Samsung isn't selling Android tablets doesn't have a positive effect on the popularity of Android devices. I think they are shooting themselves in the foot.
So even if it's the truth (and why would Lenovo libel Samsung?) it should be suppressed so as to not damage the reputation of your favorite platform ?
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>It's obviously calling early adopters idiots.
In a way, they are.
They're guaranteed to be getting beta-test products for the highest price anyone will ever pay.
For that, they get something that's a bigger version of the phone they paid too much for a few months before.
And very, very few of them get any sort of compensatory social or business boost from the image bump of having the latest and greatest. The only thing they all get is the tiny endorphin rush of buying something cool.
The mercantile world ha
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Here in Brazil, tablets are extremely expensive: you don't get a netbook for the price of a tablet... you get a notebook. Mind you, desktops are cheaper than notebooks over here.
It's like that in many markets across the world. For example, where I live, the P1000 Galaxy Tab - which I think is the oldest and cheapest model - sells at the equivalent of $1000. It is only marginally cheaper than the iPad 2 (the first iPad ever sold here; arrived a month ago to 2-3 stores in the entire country). Something tells me they won't sell many of either.
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The pricing you note is not exclusive to Brazil. For the most part, globally, in averages, price ranges are:
Desktops Netbooks Tablets = Laptops = High End Desktops
Despite this, the iPad 2 still seems to be overselling netbooks. So its not just an issue with price. Price MAY make non-apple tablets more appealing, though.
If rumors are true, we will be seeing a $250 Kindle Tablet soon with an Android fork that will run Android 2.2 apps but no Google services at all, and likely fork compatibility going forwar
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woops, slashdot deleted my "lesser than" signs in between the device categories...
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Channel Stuffing? You mean advertising? Yeah, everyone does that...
Except Apple because they could not manufacture enough iPads to keep up with demand initially let alone having some left to "stuff" the channel. There was no need to report "shipped" units when they could just quote sold units.
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So how does Lenovo guy know much about Samsung sales?
Samsung published its sales figures. They recently (about a month ago) decided to halt that practice, possibly because it was giving their competitors an advantage in the market.