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.

Comparison: Verizon iPhone 4 and Two Hot New Android Smartphones [INFOGRAPHIC]

Thinking of picking up one of those new Verizon iPhones? Take a look at this infographic first.

Here’s a comparison of two Verizon-bound smartphones recently introduced at CES 2011, with Verizon’s iPhone 4 rolled out last week sandwiched in between. Created by one of Skatter Tech‘s student reporters, it’s remarkably comprehensive.

When you compare the Motorola Droid Bionic and HTC Thunderbolt to the iPhone 4, the iPhone starts to look like last year’s model. Well, that’s because it is.

However, the iPhone 4′s screen resolution is still higher than the other two, and then there’s that iTunes App Store with 300,000 choices for the iPhone, as opposed to the Android Market’s 200,000 apps (and counting fast) for the other two phones (sorry, kid, but you got that number wrong in your infographic).

What we really wanted to see in this comparison was the darling of CES, the Motorola Atrix 4G, that R2-D2-like smartphone that’s powerful enough to be the brains of a laptop, plugging in to its back for an instant large screen and keyboard.

Too bad there’s no 4G capability yet on the iPhone, the lack of which will make those who pick up the Verizon version next month feel like they’re holding onto an antique long before their contracts run out.

Peruse this infographic, and see if the features that are important to you are eclipsed by a model that’s not your favorite:

Here's Why The Playbook Will Do Better Than Everybody Expects

The upcoming Playbook tablet from Research In Motion is going to be a much stronger contender than people expect, says a former employee.

The reason: Flash applications running on the device itself -- not just in the Web browser, as they do on Android tablets -- could finally let RIM match the huge number of apps for the iPad and Android tablets.

James Schauer is a partner at Octave Partners, but he worked at RIM until about a year ago, and oversaw the business plan for BlackBerry App World.

Here's why he thinks Flash is so important.

Flash is easy to develop for.

Especially compared with the Objective-C development language used for Apple's iOS. It's also got a huge number of developers.

Flash apps will be first-class citizens.

Although Flash owner Adobe has tried to get developers to create desktop Flash apps -- that's what AIR is about -- the most common place for Flash is the Web, particularly Web video. With the Playbook (and future BlackBerry phones), Flash app will have access to core functions like email, contacts, location, and IM. This will make Flash apps more like first-class citizens -- equivalent to iPhone or iPad apps -- and get developers excited to build more of them.

Consumers know Flash.

Apple's lack of support will eventually turn into a liability for the iPad.


Schauer also noted that RIM does much more than Apple to help carriers, and points to data compression as an example. The iPhone is a huge "bandwidth hog," says Schauer, but AT&T has been afraid to criticize Apple for fear that it might lose favor. By working more closely with carriers, RIM will have a better chance of getting them to promote and resell its products.

Lastly, Schauer says that RIM is aiming at corporate IT before consumers because that's where it's got the strongest sales channel, and where it faces the greatest threat from the iPad.

This seems like a risky strategy to us, as consumers tend to drive technology decisions much more than they did a few years ago.

But given that RIM is coming into the tablet market a year behind Apple, it may be the best approach available

A Paintbrush Stylus for iPad [VIDEO]

This week, I had a chance to review the Nomad Brush, a beautiful, handcrafted stylus designed for painting and sketching on the iPad.

The stylus feels and looks like an actual paintbrush, complete with a 5.5-inch wooden handle and a mix of natural and synthetic fibers selected for their conductive properties. When I first came across this demo video of the stylus last week, I was skeptical that the iPad‘s touchscreen surface would be able to pick up the stylus’s soft bristles, but I’m happy to report that the iPad easily responds to the touch. It allows for free-flowing brush strokes much like a real paintbrush, and an elegance of line I was previously unable to achieve using my fingers or a regular stylus.

Since we’ve only used the brush for a day, we can neither guarantee that it will work a year or even a month from now with heavy use, nor whether the bristles will hold their shape. (As a side note, we’re still looking for a way to keep those bristles intact while traveling; I plan to use my standard canvas brush holder in the meantime.) Given how much we plan to use the thing, we should have a pretty good idea of how it holds up by the time the brush goes on sale in early February.

The Nomad Brush was conceived by Don Lee, a 39-year-old architect based in New York. After 14 years as an architect, Lee decided to take a year-long break from his profession “to rejuvenate [his] creative side,” he explains.

As part of the rejuvenation process, Lee took up sketching on the iPad. “The finger is by far the most efficient way to navigate the iPad, but when it came to sketching, I just couldn’t get used to it,” Lee says. “As a problem solver by nature, I started to tinker and found a solution, and that’s how the Nomad Brush came about.”

At launch, only a black version with a 5.5-inch handle will be available for purchase, followed by a version with a white handle. In the future, Lee plans to create additional versions with varying brush head sizes and handle lengths. Pricing has not yet been disclosed, though given that each stylus is hand made, we expect it will be a bit pricier than the typical stylus.

In the meantime, check out our hands-on video below

Android Surpasses Apple as the Leading OS on Mobile Ad Network

Mobile advertising network Millenial Media announced today that the Android OS has surpassed Apple’s iOS as the leading smartphone OS on its network.

The news lends further support for a prediction Gartner Research made in September: that the open-source Android OS would be the leading smartphone OS by 2014.

Android phones outsold iPhones for the first time in early 2010, and a report from Nielsen recently revealed that Android increased its share of new smartphone buyers between January and November while Apple’s share remained about steady and BlackBerry’s decreased.

Part of Android’s advantage is that it runs on devices from multiple manufacturers, while Apple’s and RIM’s operating systems run only on their devices. Apple is still Millenial network’s leading manufacturer with about 21% market share.

At least on Millenial’s network, however, Android is getting a lot of attention from advertisers. Android ad requests grew 141% from Q3 to Q4 of 2010 while Apple requests grew 12% and RIM requests grew 60%. Android apps also dominated, accounting for 55% of revenue from application platforms.

These stats only apply to Millenial’s network, which the company says reaches about 80% of the mobile phone-carrying U.S. population. But given recent trends, we wouldn’t be surprised to find out that other networks are seeing similar shifts in smartphone market share. It will be interesting to see if next month’s release of the iPhone for Verizon can pull iOS back into the lead.

Motorola Atrix 4G Dual-Core Android Smartphone

Android phones made a splash at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), but few generated as many waves as the Motorola Atrix 4G.

The Atrix is not only one of the first dual-core smartphones, it is also one of the first 4G devices for AT&T. It runs on an Nvidia Tegra 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and sports a glorious 960×540 qHD screen. It even comes with a dock that will let you run Android and the desktop version of Firefox simultaneously.

Out of all the phones we played with at CES, the Motorola Atrix was the best of the bunch. It’s faster than the iPhone 4 and the multimedia dock is a useful accessory for anyone who needs to quickly get on the web while on the go.