Gizmo geeks are warming up to tablet PCs as these blur the divide between netbooks and high-end smartphones
Tablet PCs might not exactly be selling like hotcakes in India yet, but the excitement they elicit is worth noting.
Eugene Ngyuen, a 34-year-old social entrepreneur, tweets: “I have finally got my Apple iPad from a US-returned cousin. Can’t wait to get started.” Ngyuen had her first brush with the iPad at the InterContinental hotel in Mumbai. “When I visited Koh, a Thai restaurant at the InterContinental, instead of a menu, I was handed an iPad with an app called iKoh. This interactive digital-menu on the sleek iPad, which included images of signature dishes and a digital feedback form, was simply perfect to get me started with the iPad,” she says. With 20 iPads – reportedly bought at an approximate price of Rs 40,000 each – doubling up as menu cards at Koh, visitors are bound to be impressed.
The success of the Apple iPad in the US has created a halo around tablet PCs in general. Back in India, too, while consumers express interest in its new form factor, most remain confused about what tablet PCs actually are. Adding to their dilemma are Streak from Dell and Samsung’s Galaxy, which made their foray into the Indian market at Rs 35,000 and Rs 38,000, respectively.
Other than the high price-point, these tablet PCs are blurring the divide between netbooks and high-end smartphones. Take, for examples, the Dell Streak. With a five-inch display screen and an Android OS, and the ability to use it for voice calls, this falls into the smartphone category.
Arjun Maheshwari, a post-graduate student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, has ordered four Dell Streak tablet phones, which he plans to gift his family back in India when he returns in March. He says: “With a five-inch screen, it sits smack in the middle — between smartphones, with displays topping 4.3 inches, and the iPad, with its 9.7-inch screen. It does support Adobe Flash, giving it the advantage in web videos over the iPad.”
While such users prefer tablet PCs, others may not agree.
Take the case of 25-year-old Jatin Desai, who has just stepped into the professional life and plans to buy an ultra-portable PC. “Though I have a notebook, I am confused whether I should buy a tablet PC or a netbook, or simply buy an iPhone. Frankly, I just want to access the net on the move and be able to do some basic stuff. The options available in the market are too confusing,” he says.
If one takes a closer look, the features of a netbook and tablet PC are almost the same. Netbooks come with a screen size of 10 to 12 inches, look like notebooks, run on Linux and Windows, use solid-state, flash memory-based hard drives and are priced between Rs 20,000 and Rs 25,000.
Tablets, on the other hand, are touchscreen PCs and have a display screen of between five and seven inches. Most of these have Android OS and use flash-based drives. But these gadgets are priced in the Rs 32,000-38,000 range.
“If you are talking about high-performance computing, tablet PCs or netbooks are not useful. Tablet PCs are for consumption of content. So, if you want to check your mails, probably reply or access a presentation, listen to music and stuff, tablet PCs/netbooks make sense. From consumers’ perspective, they need to figure out the purpose for buying such a product,” says Vishal Tripathi, principal research analyst, Gartner.
In the US, tablet PCs have eaten into the market share of netbooks. In India, where netbooks account of 15 per cent of the overall portable PC segment, the immediate impact might be very low, according to IDC.
“Tablet PCs are not mass market products, especially in a market like India. Besides, even from the utility point of view, a lot is to be desired — both in terms of infrastructure and localised content for the adoption of tablet PCs. I think the tablet PC will be the rich-man’s mini-notebook. The pricing-versus-utility comparison will kick in after some time. It’s still early to predict,” says Sumanta Mukherjee, lead PC analyst, IDC India.
Rachna Shah, an engineering student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, sums it up: She had the chance to test various tablet PCs during her stay abroad. Now, back home in New Delhi, she has made up her mind to buy an Android-based tablet PC, like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, for herself, but is willing to let the market mature. She says: “I would take Windows and Android over an Apple iPad anyday. No camera, lack of multitasking capability, and the steep cost make an iPad pretty useless compared to the others. More important, we are just beginning to see 3G deployments in India, a feature that is a must-have to run multimedia on tablet PCs, as WiFi hot spots are far and few. I think it will be best that we wait for prices to drop to reasonable levels.”
