Apple’s iPad, Hewlett-Packard’s Slate, Amazon.com’s Kindle. These and other entries are quickly swelling a category of mobile touchscreen devices with sizable screens and often without physical keyboards. Minute by minute, the products in this category are beginning to position themselves.
Before the iPad’s launch last weekend, a lot of the discussion had been centered around whether Apple’s newest offspring would totally usurp the Kindle’s position as the leading e-reader. In part, this was propelled by various reports about the two companies’ negotiations with major book publishers, which led Amazon to raise its prices for e-book versions of best sellers.
‘Media Consumption Device’
The e-reader versus iPad theme was also driven by the obvious interest of magazine publishers in the new Apple product, with the publishers jockeying for alliances and unveiling new media-based approaches for their magazines. If the iPad does establish a successful beachhead with magazines, it would be able to expand on the e-reading category.
But this is a new week, and HP’s Slate is a key focal point following its release earlier this week of a video teasing the capabilities of the as-yet-unreleased offering, as well as the leak of a document comparing the Slate’s specs with the iPad’s.
Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, is among those observers who point out that there are at least three types of products in this emerging category.
“There are single-purpose tablets,” he said, the most prominent of which are the e-readers. Aside from the Kindle, devices focused on this use include the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble’s nook. For the purpose of hardware grouping, though, it would be best to ignore for the moment what might be called cross-device app pollination, such as using the Kindle e-book reader app on the iPad.
The iPad, Greengart noted, is focused on being a…
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