Buy today’s tablet, or avoid sorrows and buy tomorrow’s?
By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 11 November 2010 00:15
As Samsung’s Galaxy Tab launched yesterday in India, Samsung was launching a 7-inch AMOLED screen and a 10.1-inch prototype tablet at the Flat Panel Displays (FPD) 2010 expo in Japan, giving users a glimpse into Galaxy Tab versions circa 2011!
The old perennial question of when to buy rears its ugly head when it comes to the topic of tablets.
From a gazillion articles talking up iPad competitors, the only a very few have proven noteworthy in this early stage of the tablet game, especially with Apple already having sold over 7m of its “magical and revolutionary” iPads, with Samsung’s Galaxy Tab one of that handful of standouts.
Although Samsung has come to take as many bites of the tablet cherry as it can, as early as it can, Samsung has more customers to please than just the CEO, unlike Apple.
Samsung also showcases its future technologies at trade shows, thus giving us a pretty good guesstiglimpse into the likely future.
Yes, I just guesstimated up a new word there, but hey, it’s all in a day’s work.
Anyway. Samsung’s first tablet effort, the Galaxy Tab, is a polished competitor, exhibiting some of the flair and finesse Apple applies to its products while coming in a much smaller form factor.
Already 7-inch apps have arrived for the device, with more promised to come, but now some are wondering how soon it will be before an AMOLED equipped 7-inch Galaxy Tab successor appears on the marketplace, whether it will cost any more, how Samsung’s 10-inch Galaxy Tab might perform and what it might look like.
The thing is, we knew they were coming as Samsung had already said so, and we all know now that a product’s successor is already being planned once the first version hits store shelves.
The question is how much a particular item can help to improve your life now, and where you are in the cycle of expected product updates, so you aren’t feeling like a chump having bought “the latest” model only to have it totally superseded by the brand-new, expensive and naturally must-have new model only two months later.
In theory, Australians won’t be able to buy any new iPad until anytime between March and July next year. Any new Samsung Tab is unlikely to come out any earlier, and might come out even later, although a lot likely depends on how quickly Google gets Android 2.3 and 3.0 out the door.
After all, Galaxy Tabs only launched into the global marketplace over the last couple of weeks, but if you thought mobile phone evolution was hot, tablet evolution is getting set to run even hotter.
If you can see that a tablet will improve your life in a meaningful way above and beyond a netbook, notebook or MacBook Air, then by all means investigate them, and if one appeals and it’s in your budget, then buy one, whichever model it is you have chosen.
Alternatively, satisfying your need for mobility may be better served with a netbook, notebook or MacBook Air, or waiting for a better tablet tomorrow.
But if you choose to wait for tomorrow, or go with watch closely and choose wisely from new the technologies on offer as unveiled, to best avoid buyer’s remorse and any sorrow!
Apple CEO Steve Jobs poses with the white iPhone 4 during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California June 7, 2010.
