As retailers in Australia get set to ramp up sales of Android based tablets from the likes of ASUS, Acer, Motorola, Samsung and Viewsonic serious questions have been raised about the marketing of the tablets along with the lack of applications for the Honeycomb tablet.Some retailers are concerned that Samsung Australia has set a “dangerous” precedence when they launched the 7 inch Android Samsung Galaxy Tab at $995 just before Xmas and then dropped the price to sub $300 three months later.
A JB Hi Fi store Manager said: “This has left a bad taste with the people who went out and purchased the Samsung offering at $900 and then saw it crash in price. It’s going to be very hard to convince consumers that the new $800+ 10 inch Android tablets are not going to head the same way”.
Both carriers and retailers such as Dick Smith, JB Hi Fi and Harvey Norman have told ChannelNews that they are keeping stocks low of Android based tablets until they “see clear demand for the devices”.
At the recent Motorola Xoom launch Andrew Vollard the General Manager of Mobile for Telstra said his organisation was taking a “cautious approach” though he was confident that the Motorola offering had a good chance of success.
At the weekend Nvidia CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang said that most Android manufacturers were struggling to market their Android tablets and that they had no clear point of difference when compared to what was on offer from Apple.
He implied that the iPad’s lower pricing, clearer marketing, and better buying experience at retail were all impacting the chances of tablets like the Motorola Xoom, which he singled out as an example of what went wrong.
“The baseline configuration [of the Xoom] included 3G when it shouldn’t have,” he said in reference to Telstra’s minimum $840 asking price. “Tablets should have a Wi-Fi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones.”
Huang said that a commonly cited deficit in native apps was a problem for Honeycomb tablets and that despite being nearly three months old Android 3.0 has only a few dozen optimised or native apps, many of which are simply ports of iPad titles.
The iPad launched with as many as 1,000 native apps and now has over 65,000, almost all of which are exclusives he said.
He claimed that many Android tablet manufacturers, including LG, Motorola, and Samsung, initially assumed they could succeed with tablets by repeating the carrier-first strategy they took with smartphones.
In Australia Acer has taken a different approach by developing relationships with third party organisations who offer discount coupons to consumers who buy an Acer Android tablet.
Huang claims that carriers are making a mistake pushing 3G versions of tablets which force consumers to buy a data plan.
He said that the Motorola Xoom and first Galaxy Tab all started off as 3G models priced above Wi-Fi iPads and, in the case of the Xoom, above even the 32GB 3G iPad it was meant to compete against.
Tying them to a provider, even without a contract, has both limited their retail reach as well as discouraged buyers who assumed they might have to pay a monthly rate just to use a given tablet at all.
A spokesperson for JB Hi Fi said that it was still early days for Android tablets “There are several issues including a lack of applications that will make it hard to sell an Android tablet. Everyone wants an iPad and while there is a curiosity around Android tablets most consumers are buying an iPad” they said.
