Well it appears the PC Hardware vendors may drop out of the Android tablet market altogether. According to reports, Acer, Asustek and Dell may drop out due to fierce competition by Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This is surprising news considering Asus is releasing the first Tegra 3 tablet in December and Acer has suggested their own release of tablets with Tegra 3 inside. While this is purely speculative, an upstream hardware supply chain suggests that they should be seeing orders by now from these companies if they were planning to push tablet sales in the next year. This however, is not because PC vendors lack compelling hardware.
Given, that the three main competitors offer compelling content to compliment their hardware, PC vendors were hard pressed by offering stock OS flavors to theirs. Couple this with cheaper tablet prices by both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, PC vendors didn’t have a leg to stand on price wise. According to the report:
“With Amazon offering its Kindle Fire at US$199 and Barnes & Noble to provide its upcoming Nook Simple Touch at a price of US$99, the pure hardware players are unlikely to profit from the market through price competition.”
Like it was said before, this right now is speculative. However, we have seen PC vendors start to pull their tablets that may suggest that this move could happen. Some also suggest that these companies are holding off on their orders until Windows 8 is out. Although these vendors may see the same issues in that market as well. One thing is for sure, companies and vendors are now starting to see that in order to offer a compelling product they must do more than just offer compelling hardware.
[via Digitimes]