Dell Tablet Chief Says He Was “Underwhelmed” By iPad

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last two weeks, most of you will have heard that Apple finally launched its much hyped tablet device the iPad last weekend.

Not to be outdone, rivals Dell, Lenovo, and HP are all scheduled to be developing their own touch screen tablet devices, with HP cheekily releasing a video highlighting the relative weakness of the iPad by clearly demonstrating the strengths of its HP slate.

Sneaky we must say, and it certainly worked on me.

Dell has not made much of a secret of its plans to launch a 5-inch tablet device within the next three months, which is said the be called “Streak”, though that name has yet to be officially bestowed by the company.

Neeraj Choubey general manager for Dell’s tablet division says the Round Rock Texas based company has deliberately steered well clear of the iPad launch, so that its offering is not too closely associated with the Apple device.

The 9.7 inch iPad screen is nearly double the size of Dell’s tablet, so differentiating itself from Apple shouldn’t be too hard.

“We would be in the market at the same time, but we didn’t want the comparison,” Mr. Choubey said.

He added that he was “underwhelmed” by the iPad saying that “It was not what I was expecting, it was kind of like the iPod Touch scaled up.”

“We’re not going to get distracted by what’s going on in the market, we’ll definitely see the competition, recognize it, give credit where it’s due, but we’re not going to chase markets.” Mr. Choubey said.

Dell’s 5-inch gadget appears to be just the first offering in a family of tablet devices, most of which will be powered using Google’s Android operating system, and some with larger screen sizes.

Dell would like its offerings to be able to double as smartphones, with consumers being able to select both voice and data plans

“We’ve struck gold with these devices… once you touch it, feel it hold it, you’ll definitely understand the value proposition.”

A pretty bold statement there and one that sounds exceedingly confident, enough to arouse our curiosity we must say.

The war in the market for hand held internet enabled devices really erupted last weekend, having first simmered in the smartphone market over the last few years. During the next few months and years the choice available to consumer’s looks set to explode, and the battle for consumer’s hearts and minds is going to become incredibly brutal with some winners, and unfortunately some losers.

It by no means is a foregone conclusion that Apple with its first mover advantage in launching the tablet is going to run away with it like it did in the media player and smartphone segments.

Many analysts seem to believe that content and applications will drive sales and clearly with iTunes, its iPhone and now iPad app stores, Apple is well positioned there.

I’m not so sure about that logic myself though. I think sweet systems sell themselves rather than the bells and whistles that they come with. If Apple did well with media players and smartphones, its because they were easy to use products that consumers could work intuitively.

Clearly there is a large market for hand-held internet enabled devices which manufacturers are going to carve up over the next few years, all be it at high cost to some of them. It will certainly be interesting to see which company emerges as the dominant player and alpha dog this time round.

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