Is Tablet Success Bound To Their Crackability?

Hitting the front page for the first time, rippeltippel writes "The Economist recently published an article about HP quitting the tablet market. Nothing new I said, until I read 'the announcement showed that the firm had finally seen the light about the tablet market — namely, that there is no such thing.' But are the games closed with the iPad as a clear winner? Possibly not: 'hackers have embraced the Nook, "rooting" its underlying Linux software ... so it can run many more applications from Google's online app store and elsewhere.' A review on Amazon's Kindle tablet page reads: 'They've cracked it — this is the future.' Can it possibly be read as 'Crackable tablets are the future of tablets?'" Smartphone vendors seem to have gotten the message: users want to control the software on their phones. It is a shame that Palm/HP, who were one of the only vendors open from the start, more or less lost the game. Unfortunately it seems that tablet and ebook reader vendors have yet to get the message.

Re:Umm, no?

[houstonbofh]

Very vocal minority are making noise that they want hackable widgets. How about some statistics showing just how many widgets are actually hacked? Is it even 5%?

OK. 5% of 65million phones is 3.25 million phones. (Probably more as I only found old data with a quick google) In 2009, Palm, Symbian and "Others" was only 3.7 million phones. So I guess that 5% is enough. http://seekingalpha.com/article/194442-predicting-2010-north-american-smartphone-market-share [seekingalpha.com]


And that is assuming your 5% is correct, which I disagree with. Cynaogen is almost mainstream. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/22/android_on_touchpad_project/ [theregister.co.uk] Almost everyone I know with an Android, has it. Admittedly, my sample has less blithering idiots than the public at large...

Re:That they've gotten the message remains to be s

[msauve]

Note that what Nielsen calls "market share," isn't, by the common definition. It's actually installed base, which is a trailing indicator. People who bought phones almost two years ago, and haven't upgraded because they're under contract and not eligible for a subsidy are in those numbers. "Q2 market share" should refer to sales during Q2, not how many people owned a brand.

Since Android sales have been increasing faster than iPhone sales, Android market share is actually greater than what Nielsen implies.

Where Nielsen's "market share" shows Android/iOS at 39% / 28%, NPD's report on true market share [npd.com] (sales) shows 52% / 29%.

Re:Umm, no?

[hweimer]

In the UK, 6.2% of the general population hack their consumer products in order to improve them [ssrn.com]. If you adjust that to the part of the population that actually owns a tablet, you will probably get an even larger number.

Re:Would you pay $600 for a fake watch ?

[LanMan04]

. I still hate OSX and IOS for being so restrictive and toy-like

I obviously agree on iOS, but OS X?? What the heck is toy-like about it? It's UNIX for christsakes.