Apple COO Tim Cook says he is utterly unimpressed by the plethora of Android and Windows-based tablets showcased in glitzy Las Vegas during CES 2011.
“If you look at what’s shipping today, there’s not much out there. Generally speaking, there’s two kinds of groups today at best on the market today – ones using a Windows tablet PC, are fairly big and heavy and expensive,” Cook explained during an earnings call transcribed byPC Mag.
“They have weak battery life, they require a stylus, and from our point of view and what’s we’ve seen customers are just not interested in them. Then you have the Android tablet, and the variety are out shipping today, the operating system really wasn’t designed for a tablet.”
Cook also emphasized that even Google had conceded its pre-Honeycomb versions of Android weren’t coded or optimized for a tablet-based experience.
“So, you wind up having a size of a tablet that is less than what we believe is reasonable, or one that we provide what we feel is the real tablet experience.
“Basically, you end up with a sort of scaled-up smartphone, which is a bizarre product, in our view.”
Unsurprisingly, Cook didn’t seem all that concerned over Honeycomb-powered tablets either, saying the systems generally lacked the performance, UI, apps and features offered by the iPad.
“The next generation of Android tablets, which is what you discussed primarily at CES – there’s nothing shipping yet, and so I don’t know. [But] generally, they [seem to] lack performance specs, they lack prices, they lack timing, and so today they’re vapor.
“[Of course], we’ll assess them as they come out, wherever, but we’re not sitting still, and we have a huge first mover advantage. And we have an incredible user experience from iTunes to the App Store and an enormous number of apps and a hugee ecosystem. So we’re very [obviously] very confident…” [[Apple]]
