Apple's Tim Cook Dismisses iPad Rivals

Apple CEO Tim Cook has dismissed iPad rivals as irrelevant, in the wake of record profit figures announced by the Cupertino giant.

The company sold 7.3-million iPads in the three-months up to Christmas - adding to a $6-billion quarterly profit.

After the profit announcement, Cook was asked about current and planned iPad rivals.

"There's not much out there as you know. There are two kinds of groups today [in the market] – the ones using a Windows-based operating system. They're big, heavy and expensive. Weak battery life. Need keyboard or stylus. From our point of view, customers aren't interested in that.

"Then you have the Android tablets. The variety shipping today, the OS wasn't designed for a tablet – but Google said this.

"So you wind up having the size of a tablet that's less than reasonable. Or one that's not even a real tablet experience. It's a "scaled-up smartphone" – that's a bizarre product in our view."

He's right, of course. There is no real rival at the moment. The real threat comes from planned tablets running an updated Google Android OS, Honeycomb.  That WILL be designed to run on tablets comparable in size and features to the iPad.

Android-powered smartphones are now a real rival to the iPhone...the same will happen with tablets.

Honeycomb is due for release "sometime early this year", according to Google. That probably means summer, or even autumn.

Apple has the market virtually to itself....at the moment. 

Follow IJSMblog on Twitter and Facebook