Thread: Future success of internet tablets, or lack thereof (speculation, prediction)
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varis is offline varis
2006-02-20 , 22:21
Posts: 67 | Thanked: 3 times | Joined on Feb 2006
#20
Very good post, something I was asking for

Originally Posted by Jerome
Let's try to predict from the other end: not "what can we build?" but "what do users want to do?" and "how do we finance it?".

You see: this was why cellular phone caught on: users wanted to talk, and the network was to be financed by calling charges.

Now about the Nokia 770:
-do users want web access on the go with a small tablet? Not that much, I'm afraid: sites get more and more complex, people are used to animations, videos, all things which take computing power and network bandwidth. And site builders want to open thousands of advertisement windows on your desktop.
Web is the killer application - or a platform, rather - of our time. I think quite a few people buy PCs for that one application, and if you are offered with something which is smaller, less expensive, and lets you get the information you want... The point about flash etc is probably correct, you could solve this with adding more CPU, RAM, etc, but then you'd increase cost, decrease battery life, and so on, and you'd be out of the sweet spot again with your tablet product.

One key question indeed is how easy it is to make people recognize their need for web browsing/internet communication on the go. Many get enough web usage hours at work/home with the PC. Perhaps some have other uses for the PC time, and would rather browse for news on the bus. Or they could just prefer casual browsing while sitting on the couch at home, or find other uses for the tablet while at work.

-do users want E-mail on the go? Yes. But many exchange word documents (heresy, I know, but this is what many people do). And network operators would rather have you use sms at horrid prices per byte. And you need a keyboard. And the device to check E-mail on its own. Think blackberry.
Fixable problem, for example you could just make a tablet with a version of Windows. I hear Windows PDAs have difficulty editing the documents, but still...

-do users want to phone over the Internet? It's only cheaper and a lot less convenient than a cell phone.
I think VoIP on 770 would be a killer application only for certain early adopters. People who have used Skype for years. And who dislike cell phones for some reason. Maybe net hungry people in their early 20's and on a budget?

I read that IP will be the most efficient medium for voice traffic in the next few years. Widespread adoption might take a bit longer I figure, say in 5-10 years VoIP devices might be the norm. But this wouldn't help with our scenario as the time frame is different.

-what else? Music? Cell phones do that. Videos? Get a PSP portable. Games? Cell phone or PSP again. PDA? Cell phones do that. So what else?
These are important, because a tablet can function as a general purpose platform much better than a cellphone, and will thus provide various things to different users. Nokia would be stupid to ignore the PDA/PIM side, the plethora of other applications will come from the community. Little board games and HTML/javascript based web games would be very nice on a tablet.

You could help this side by giving beefier hardware: CPU, RAM, storage... Make this well with a device that also has superb player capability, and you may even turn a nice profit. However the bulk of the tablet market will be around the $200-400 mark, and you need to push that hard in the beginning to achieve mind share. This is a problem for the OQO, and I don't think that device will catch on for a few years yet.

-users have been trained to get a cell phone for free and to pay for it through calling charges. Heresy, but this is what people do. A 770 at 350€ versus a cell phone at 1€ won't sell. Same with game consoles: cheap consoles, but you pay extra for the games. Nokia has announced "premium content" for the 770, but I haven't seen any.
True in the North Am, not true in parts of Europe, little clue about the rest of the world here. Even in Finland cell phones are paid by the employers for some people, getting the same financing for a tablet might not be that easy.

This is a troublesome point: The adopters of tablets would need to be forerunners favouring internet style economies - significant initial investement in infrastructure, after that lots of content and service for almost free.

-cellular network operators have no interest in wifi competition.
-they also hate E-mail or anything that could eat in the surprisingly high revenues they get from SMS.
-wifi networks can't be built, if nobody will finance them. Chicken and egg problem.
The number of WLAN providers is increasing, and often they don't have anything to do with cell operators. Lucrative competition with the cellular world can even push the building of WLAN networks.Telcos are powerful though and they could hinder the adoption of tablets.

Just do the following exercise: talk to your non-geek friends and ask them what they'll DO with the 770. See if they can find a killer application for it. If there is no application, there won't be success.
The web is obvious. Other things are mainly the same as on a PDA. But you will have the 'newer, bigger and better' effect over PDAs, which means the technology market could flow in the direction of tablets as well. My Mom liked playing Mahjongg and Crazyparking, well she is a geek in disguise but you should not underestimate the number and power of geeks as drivers of technology markets either.
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