Battle of the Tablets: The next great tech war?

Wednesday, 19 October 2011 07:04

Written by Resti Reyes. Jr.

At the start of the year, we had predicted that 2011 would be “The Year of the Tablet”. Now that we are in the last quarter, the latest developments have all but confirmed our prediction.

Our generation has seen several great technology battles in the last few decades. The most memorable would be the VHS versus Betamax war of the 80’s. Before that we had the 8-track vs. the cassette tape. At one point there was a small skirmish between the CD and the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) introduced by Philips; and separately, a clash between Sony’s Mini Disc (MD) and the Digital Audio Tape, or DAT. More recently we saw HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. Sometimes it’s a three-way fight: Nintendo vs. Playstation vs. XBox.

There is one tech war that never got resolved: the Mac vs. Microsoft battle of the Operating Systems (OS), which was preceded by a hardware duel that also never got resolved between Apple and the PC model developed by IBM (and its subsequent IBM clones, or IBM-compatibles, if you want to be more politically correct). These two wars are still raging, and while most people have given their bets to the one with the far bigger market share, namely Microsoft and the PC, recent events show that the tide may be turning. Apple has without a doubt made the greatest strides in the last few years in all of its history, with the launch of a few game-changing products that have in fact been changing our lifestyles: the iPod, the iPhone, iTunes, and the iPad.

And with success comes competition. The old dictum says, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. These days, innovators do not doubt that at all, what they fear is that the first on their doorstep are the ones who will challenge them with even better mousetraps. That is how things are shaping up in the newest product category created by the late Steve Jobs – the media tablet, and the brewing war that will inevitably follow it.

Again, the battle is being fought in both the hardware sector and the software side. In the Operating Systems arena, Microsoft has been replaced by Google as the dominant provider of the operating platform used by more devices. While Apple remains the independent minority player but with a fiercely loyal following. Let’s tackle software first…

The Android system developed by Google is open-source – meaning free to use by anyone, and is therefore more popular. It is used by manufacturers like Motorola, HTC, and Samsung. Microsoft’s Windows System and Office Suites were never free, but they were easily pirated, and so became more accessible. Android powered devices are generally cheaper if only because there are no costs attached to the Operating Systems, and because it is open-source, there are plenty of add-ons and plug-ins – more popularly known as apps – that are available in the internet for anyone who cares to download them.

The iPhone and the iPad’s iOS system, in contrast, is a closed and exclusive system, no-one else uses it. And if you need to download an app, you can only do so by accessing their exclusive distribution channel – the iTunes website.

There are other operating systems, but they have not gained as big a following as these two, and we predict that eventually they may die a natural death in the next few years. One example is the Symbian OS of Nokia. It is officially abandoned, as Nokia itself has announced. The same goes for the webOS of the HP TouchPad – abandoned only days after it was launched. Still a contender (for now, anyway) would be the QNX Neutrino system employed by RIM for the Blackberry Playbook – the other exclusive, closed system preferred by Canada’s Research in Motion, makers of the popular Blackberry.

The obvious and conspicuously absent entity here is Microsoft, as they have been struggling to come up with an OS suitable for the tablet market. Windows 7 is simply not a fit for the radically different interface that the tablet uses compared to the regular PC – touch is not the same as a keyboard and a mouse. Microsoft has been able to convince Nokia to adopt its Windows system to replace the old and cumbersome Symbian system it has been using for it’s mobile phones. And with the recent announcement that Microsoft has finally completed the Windows 8, their combination could be a potent challenger to the mighty iPad.

That brings our discussion to the hardware sector… Nokia has yet to launch a true media tablet, but we expect this slipping giant to come around soon and introduce its own challenger to the iPad. Every other major manufacturer has been busy doing the same thing.

(to be continued)