Excellent post by Matt Gemmell detaining everything Apple’s competitors need to understand about the iPad. Seriously, anyone trying to take on Apple, please listen to this guy, not the usual industry pundits:
It’s difficult to get our heads around the fact that these non-technologically-savvy users can suddenly constitute a core market for a device, yet that’s the case here. Nintendo saw it, and Apple sees it too. It’s an uncomfortable realisation since these people are so unfamiliar to people like you, as hardware manufacturers, and me as a software engineer. This discomfort leads to a kind of understandable blindness, and more importantly can make us leave money on the table. The relative sales and demand figures for Wii vs PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 over the last several Christmases are indicative of that.
When competing with iPad, you have to realise that, to your new core market, tablets are not computers. There’s no such thing (to your customer) as a “tablet computer”; the very name reduces the likelihood they’ll buy it. The potential of the tablet is that it’s not even seen as a computing device. This is an incredible opportunity to expand into a new market, if you’ll only commit to that mindset.
Read the whole thing. Of course I’m entirely certain that most — quite likely all — iPad competitors will make essentially every mistake Matt warns against. There are very few tech companies that have Apple’s understanding of what really matters to end-users. Maybe Nintendo should do a tablet.
