Success of Apple’s iPad has created a new mobile device category: tablets. This category is currently dominated by Apple’s iPad. Market research company iSuppli estimates iPad will sell 13.8M, 43.7 and 63.3 units in 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively.
But many new alternatives are entering this space based on android and other OSs. Samsung’s galaxy (android based) tab has received positive response. Many other companies around the world are following suit.
You may say ‘Big deal. This is just another mobile device’. You would be wrong. These devices offer a whole new form factor that is ideal for living room usage. They also enable new types of applications that take advantage of multi touch interface to provide much richer and more immersive navigation experience than the mouse and keyboard based interfaces. Flipboard and Aweditorium are a couple of good examples of these new genre of tablet applications. (see their videos below).
So many of the current applications can be redesigned to take advantage of this new platform. More importantly this will spawn a whole new set of applications that were not possible before.
I see iPad and other tablet devices as excellent gaming devices. Gaming will be the killer app for these devices. Currently most iPad games are repurposed iPhone games. But we will see increasingly more games that provide rich immersive experiences that are optimized for the tablet form factor.
I also see many enterprise uses for tablet devices. Healthcare is a no-brainer. Education is another. I see increasingly more people with iPads at business meetings. Think of all the business applications that can be reinvented on iPad and tablet devices.
We are living in exciting times. We have multiple killer platforms disrupting the consumer and business app landscape providing new opportunities for creating future giants.
Flipboard video:
Aweditorium Video: