You know we’ve been sharing that the new iPad has proved to be a more compelling reason for consumers to buy an iPad 2 than the new iPad. Then the improbable happened. The iPad 3 recovered. It did more than recover, it jumped to the top of the charts. It’s like the whole family answered the call to review Aunt Bertha’s steamy romance model on Amazon when sales were flagging. Check out the graph below to see what we’re talking about.
The new iPad has a miraculous recovery in the hearts of consumers after tax day.
What happened? Was this the result of post Tax Day ex
uberance? “Now that I’m getting a tax refund, I’m buying a new iPad!” The new iPad jumped ahead of the iPad 2 after a rapid decline in delight, something unheard of for an Apple product. In fact, the new iPad is considered to be the most delightful tablet on the market today, barring any new releases in the coming weeks as you can see in the sparklines below.
Summary of top tablets in North America. The new iPad shot to the top after languishing in the middle for weeks after launch.
If you want to know why this drastic shift took place, give us a shout at Argus Insights. We’ll be releasing a report on all the sordid details of the new iPad’s market response in the coming weeks that will include our own forecast as to the future success of the new iPad.
Argus Insights’ analysis of the tablet market continues to show interesting results that are not so easily noticeable in the marketplace. As we add new tablets to our data set, we gain greater insight into how these products perform. With this new data, we can make firm predictions about a product’s failure or success. As always, some products buck the trends. In the tablet market that underdog is Acer’s Android-based Iconia tablet series.
Wait, what? Acer makes tablets? And they’re good?
Not only does Acer make a tablet (they’ve actually released five models during this tablet craze), users love it for one reason—PRICE. With the Android tablet experience appearing so similar across devices, consumers now differentiate these devices on price.
The data above indicates that across key attributes, Acer’s Iconia Tablet receives nearly the same sentiment levels as the Motorola Xoom. The key difference between the Iconia and other tablets is the positive perception of the Iconia’s Price/Value.
This price differentiation reflects a lack of maturity in the tablet market:
The price/cost of tablet devices does not reflect the value that users receive from the devices. The usefulness of tablets has not extended beyond what can presently be done with laptops and smartphones, and therefore will continue to be seen as a luxury/fun purchase.
There is not enough differentiation to force purchase choices toward particular products.
While the average consumer may have seen Acer products in stores, few are aware of the value that the Taiwanese manufacturer brings to the US market: quality products comparable to marquis brands offered at affordable prices. In recent years, they have become more consumer-facing and less component-focused, raising the profile of their products here in the US. Those of us who are very aware of what we get from Acer know that the Iconia is the choice for great functionality and aesthetics at a price point that beats top brands. In the tablet space, or more specifically the crowded Android tablet sub-space, Acer provides greater delight to its users simply because the experience costs less than the competitors’.
Acer’s Iconia tablets are not iPad killers. They are, however, an economical standout in a crowded and homogenous tablet market. Will Acer make a big splash in the market? We’ll see, but they are happy to steal Android-based tablet market share from heavy hitters like Samsung and Motorola.
Over the jam-packed holiday weekend, a large number of people were unboxing the new HP TouchPad tablet. Argus Insight’s early results show that the HP TouchPad is now the highest-rated Tablet experience in the market today, beating out the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ (which has a larger display than iPad). Though we have some initial results below based on four days of data, we’ll report back to see if HP has hit or missed the mark for our must-have UX attributes.
We can already compare the first four days of TouchPad experience data to that of other tablets. While we tend to share our data on a timeline, we can also compare these experiences based on the product launch date. It turns out that products are similar to rockets. You can determine their success or failure pretty soon after launch. While we lack the telemetry information of modern space flight for products, Argus Insights’ algorithms do a good job of sizing up the potential impact that a product has on a market.
Below is the Buzz Landscape for the leading tablets available today. What’s different from the evidence we have shared in the past is that this is based on “days from launch” rather than calendar days. This means we can compare the launch profiles of these products to see how they compare over time. There’s a lot here, but we’ll focus solely on the TouchPad today, leaving other juicy insights for later.
The TouchPad has a respectful start, ahead in both buzz and delight against the Xoom and iPad. The Galaxy Tab has a stronger start, but falls off quickly. Notice that the TouchPad’s buzz levels are muted in comparison to some competition. Competing as it was against Transformers: Dark of the Moon, we feel that the holidays dampened the normal reviewing behavior of consumers (we’ve seen the same seasonality effects around other holidays where people share after they’ve recovered from their revelry).
Switching gears to a different view, the Rating Velocity Landscape, we see a different dynamic playing out in the market.
The Cumulative Rating Velocity is another view of how the buzz volume changes over time. Most products tend to fall over time, owing to slowing market interest. Every now and then you see a product that increases in rating over time due to a growing number of people engaging with the product. The Acer Iconia Tab (Android) is that product in the Tablet Market today. HP could follow a similar pattern, but it’s too soon to tell. We’ll have better information next week after the effects of the holiday weekend have had a chance to dampen out. If our view that the holiday weekend impacted the TouchPad results is false, then the HP TouchPad has already started its slow slide to Woot.com-dom.
