Timothy Gard
Educator, Toronto District School Board
@soligard
If you have any idea how the tablet market is heating up, then you know that Research in Motion’s (RIM) new Playbook has entered the arena with a bit of catching up to do.
Many have written short stories that end with the sudden death of the Playbook because of ‘this and that’, and many seem to keep repeating the ‘this and that’ ad nauseum regardless of the very simple fact that RIM has entered this new market with a nascent OS, and a vast amount of inexperience with larger format devices.
In fact, Apple dominates the tablet market for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is their ability to capitalize on envisioning the future technology landscapes that the masses would pay money for, and also, because their marketing prowess is unparalleled. And they know how to put together a good product that excites even the luddites of the world. Let’s face it – Apple is the darling of the masses, and to convince anyone of anything different is to enter into a circular debate that ends with the following epitaph: ‘Apple is such an easy device to use, and to top it off, it’s cool’.
To add further depth of challenge to a company with a new OS and piece of hardware wishing to gain a foothold in the tablet market, you must content with the army of manufacturers who power their tablets with Google’s Android. Prior to the launch of Motorola’s Xoom tablet, Android was an OS developed for the smartphone market, but with some tweaks and some nifty re-designs Google came up with Honeycomb, or Android version 3.0, which is more powerful and takes advantage of the larger real estate found on a tablet.
