HP's fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you're No 2

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I might get an eee pad transformer, they put in an sd slot.

They also have a nice screen, OK battery life and can double as a netbook.

It's the badge, stupid

You'll never persuade an iDolater© to buy a slab without the logo. We're seeing the same triumph of marketing over function that BMW have established with cars. There's no way that any rational choice would lead one to purchase a Beemer, when a Ford or Skoda will do the job equally well (if not better) and cost 30% less. But then no-one ever says - wow, you've got a Skoda!

iPod Docks

Apple have completely sewn up the portable music player market and part of the secret is the dock connector. There is an enormous variety of iPod docks that let an iPod owner dock their music player wherein it will be charged and can be controlled to some degree by the remote control of the dock. No other portable music players have docks like this. They have only the jack connector which won't charge batteries or provide control.

The rest of the industry needs to get together to produce a rival, open standard that would stand a fighting chance of adoption by dock manufacturers. That might give their music players a better chance of being noticed. Of course, their players would also have to be halfway decent (which I'm not sure they are right now).

title is *still* required

DLNA. I use it to stream MPEG2 video (recorded off air) from a mac to a PS3 using a paid for server. It works, so long as you don't try to fast forward or rewind. Pausing is risky. When it fails it sometimes requires a reboot of the server, sometimes the playstation. Both server and PS3 are software driven and frequently updated.

It's not a good User Experience. Also, the 'music' interface is useless - no playlists and you select from an alphabetical list. Maybe ok with 30 albums but no good with 10,000 songs.

Re Android and 'plausible honeycomb tablets'. That's not enough - they need to be better rather than plausible, with higher quality/nicer feeling HARDWARE, or significantly cheaper (20-25% - £300 against £400 for a equivalent). Hardware specs might sell to geeks but not to the general public.

Android phones took off when they network operators started giving them away free/significantly cheaper than iPhones more than for any other reason.

iPod docks

In response to Rosco, the Creative Zens used to have a dock port that allowed the device to be charged and controlled, and the sound quality was far better than the iPod.

Unfotunately, all the rival MP3 makers don't have the marketing clout of Apple, not to mention they've pretty much given up on making high capacity players. Apple seem to be the only manufacturer that makes an MP3 player (I'm not talking movie players here) with a capacity over 64Gb. When my last Zen died, and I was looking for a capacity of 100GB+, the iPod Classic was the only option.

Whilst the physical size & capacity of the Classic is good, I really don't like their menu system (Creative's original implementation is superior IMO), or the inability to delete files without synchronising the damn thing. And don't get me started on iTunes - I user a plugin for Windows Media Player to sync it, but even that is a pain when compared with being able to just drag and drop files onto it, the way I could with the Zen.

History tells us what?

Quote: "History tells us that commodity-priced rivals will take an increasing share of a consumer electronics market, as the market grows bigger."

What does the history of the iPod tell us? Other manufacturers have never taken a notable chunk of that market.

History can be useful as a reference, but you can't make sweeping assumptions like that. The phone market isn't the music player market or the tablet market. People are motivated to purchase for different reasons, and discover products in different ways.

Apple could never have taken the phone market with the iPhone in the way the iPod seized the market. The iPhone is designed to target only a segment of that market - there are many people who simply want to make calls and couldn't care less what else the phone might do. I suspect the low sales of apps to Android users vs the high sales of devices merely reflects the fact that Android phones are being shovelled out to customers who only wanted a phone. The mobile stores are bending over backwards to move these customers up a rung.

Is this going to happen with tablets? I can't see why. These things will be marketed like computers, not phones. The purchases will be looking for a tablet, not something less with tablet features added on top. If you are looking for a tablet, Apple makes a compelling case with excellent quality, support, features, price, and ecosystem.