Apple COO Calls Android Tablet a “Bizarre Product”

Ahead of its earning call for the first quarter of fiscal 2011, Apple announced record-breaking earnings, led by strong sales of the iPhone, Mac and iPad product lines.

The iPad in particular had a phenomenal holiday season, with more than 7.3 million units sold. That’s an increase of more than 85% from the fourth quarter. Since launching the iPad in April 2010, Apple has sold almost 15 million iPads.

The success of the iPad hasn’t cannibalized Mac sales — to the contrary, Apple had its best quarter ever for the Mac, selling 4.19 million units in the December quarter.

Apple: We’re Not Sitting Still

As we saw at CES, tablet fever has taken over the consumer electronics industry, with would-be iPad competitors appearing at every turn. Everyone (and we do mean everyone) has a tablet or is working on a tablet.

The fact that Apple has established a user base of nearly 15 million in just nine months makes Apple a formidable competitor in this emerging space.

For comparison, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab — one of the few high-profile non-Apple tablets to hit the retail market before the end of 2010 — managed to sell more than a million units in its first 60 days. By comparison, Apple is averaging a little more than 2 million iPad units per month, with that figure rising every month.

We should note that these sorts of leads are not insurmountable. After all, Android (Android) as a device category is now eclipsing iOS in terms of sales. Still, individual phone models from companies like HTC, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung aren’t matching the figures Apple continues to turn out with the iPhone.

Apple COO Tim Cook (the man currently taking over day-to-day operations for Steve Jobs) commented on the current competition during Tuesday’s earnings call. Cook made it clear that Apple doesn’t believe the Android-based tablets on the market are competition. He called these devices “scaled up smartphones” and continued to opine that he sees them as “bizarre product[s]” that don’t offer the “real tablet experience,” and he asserted Apple’s belief that it has a “huge, first-mover advantage.”

Cook acknowledged that future tablets running Google (Google) Honeycomb or from RIM may provide some competition, noting that Apple will “assess [the competition] as [it is] coming;” Cook made it clear that Apple isn’t sitting still.

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted that 80% of the Fortune 100 is either deploying or piloting the iPad in the enterprise. That’s up from 65% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

With this level of penetration on the consumer and business side, unseating Apple in this space won’t be easy. It will be interesting to watch what Google, Microsoft, RIM and HP do in the future.