This is shaping up to be a tablet Christmas, with touch-screen rectangles on wish lists all over. But as Claire Cain Miller and Brian X. Chen report in Monday?s New York Times, the tablet market is now complicated enough to be anxiety-inducing for shoppers.
Look at the tablets available online or at a consumer electronics store and it can be dizzying to choose from among the dozens of slim devices ? each with various sizes, features, prices and applications.
Tablets were supposed to be a simple alternative to the bloated personal computer market. And when ?tablet? was synonymous with ?iPad,? that was true.
But this is the first holiday season in which the iPad faces competitors that have built up a solid footing in the market. And Amazon and Google introduced tablets just in time for the shopping rush. As a result, many consumers and analysts say, the new market of keyboardless computers is quickly becoming as confusing as that of the old-school PC.
?What?s different about this holiday season is that consumers have not just more choice, but really good choices,? said Sarah Rotman Epps, who studies consumer computing trends at Forrester. ?There have been many iPad wannabes but no real quality alternatives, and now there are several.?
While choice is a good thing for consumers, she said, it also makes shopping ?confusing and complicated.?
For the companies that make tablets, the choice means everything. The stakes are much higher than the sale of individual devices. Each company is trying to snag lifelong customers for their other products ? like music, apps, e-books, movies, Web search or word-processing software.
While Apple has dominated the market until now, selling more tablets than any other company, its perch is being threatened by the newcomers.
?Apple left a lot of room for rivals to grow,? said Tero Kuittinen, an independent mobile analyst.
In the comments on the article, Shelley Diamond of San Francisco offers a glimpse into what shoppers are feeling: ?I have already been to the store twice and still have an entire page of questions. I probably have to hire a consultant to get through this process. I may give up.?
Other readers are weighing in with their own experiences and suggestions.
Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/daily-report-welcome-to-the-tablet-jungle/
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