The coming onslaught of iPad competitors--32 of 'em. | Hacker News Reader

The coming onslaught of iPad competitors--32 of 'em.

technologizer.com

So start by crossing anything with windows 7 off of the list.

The most interesting to my mind is the Cisco one. They seem to be targeting the enterprise - I can imagine office's full of people carrying these. RIM did awfully well in this niche. Could Cisco do the same?

I am really really hoping that HP don't mess up their purchase of Palm and deliver something fantastic with WebOS too.

I guess it depends what you mean by interesting. I'm not convinced that anyone targeting the enterprise is ever going to be able to reproduce the quality of UI that apple has achieved over the past few years.

Android has proved a huge disappointment to me because their customers have actually turned out to be enterprises (telcos customising and bundling crappy out of date versions) rather than selling direct to end users. I guess Cisco might do well in some verticals, but I'm not getting excited about it just yet.

(agreed that Windows 7 is a dead end for pads)

And everything priced at $499 or more. Why buy the cheap brand if it is just as expensive as the brand with the "Apple tax"?

The movie would be called "iPod Killers II" and be just as bad.

The are others. What strikes me is that none of them realy compete on the key feature of the iPad: its autonomy.

What do you mean by autonomy? The big drawback of the ipad is that you do still need a mac/pc to sync and backup — mobileme is nice as far as it goes, but the ipad isn't standalone just yet.

I mean the battery lifetime. I use my iPad a lot, like now for instance. Mostly to surf the web. I don't really need backup. For me It is an interactive media.

I don't expect these other devices to beat the iPad on this aspect soon. I heard HTC is planning to increase their CPU speed. For me autonomy (energy) is much more valuable.

Where's the Meego tablets?

Extremely uninspiring.

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