Biggest Bang for the Buck – iPad2, Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet?
The touchpad (or slate PC) revolution has hit consumers full force and shortly, consumers will be spoiled for choice with sleek new releases coming on the market.
Apple’s iPad of course, led the revolution and sits atop the touchpad market. Now selling the iPad2, Apple mastered the aesthetics and technical detail that has enabled touchpad PCs to wrest growing market share from desktop and notebook PCs.
Sporting a 9.7-inch touchscreen, the sleek iPad2 has WiFi and 3G/4G options to enable truly mobile computing. Typing is done on the screen and storage runs from 16GB to 64GB. The iPad2 is powered by a 1GHz dual-core Apple A5 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip and can be used for up to 10 hours without recharging.
Cameras and speakers allow iPad2 users to go one better than telephone calls by adding video to their audio chats.
Despite claims to the contrary, the PC and notebook market have been badly hit by the iPad and iPad2. During 2010, Apple sold 14.8 million iPads worldwide, representing 75% of tablet PC sales that year.
By the release of the iPad 2 in March 2011, over 15 million iPads had been sold – more than all other tablet PCs combined since the iPad’s release. In 2011, the iPad2 is expected to take 83% of the tablet computing market share in the United States.
That is where the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes and Nobles Nook come in. Amazon launched the widely reported Kindle Fire yesterday and selling units faster than they can make them. Amazon is set to sell 3 to 5 million Fire units in the remainder of 2011.
At a price point of $199, the Kindle Fire has caught the imagination of budget shopers uncomfortable with the iPad2′s $499 price. Expectations are now that the Kindle Fire will outsell the iPad2 during the all-important Christmas season.
Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet, launched a week before the Kindle Fire is also expected to do well, even at a higher price point of $249.
Both the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire are based on Google’s Android operating system and differ from the iPad2 in having a smaller 7-inch display, which is plenty large for most users.
One major difference between these cheaper competitors and the iPad2 is that they offer only Wi-Fi and not 3G, so they are not as mobile. Unless you use them in your wired home or a location with Wi-Fi, you’ll be out of luck. That however, does not deter too many buyers, who are home (or Starbucks) users, or who can ‘tether’ to their smartphones.
The Kindle Fire sports less memory capacity than its competitors – at 8GB – but claims that this limitation is overcome by storing programs and data in the Amazon Cloud. The Nook Tablet on the other hand, can be expanded to 32GB.
This will be a competitive season for all three touchpad computers. Do you intend to buy one during Christmas for yourself or someone else? If so, which one?
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