Kindle competitors on the way with more tablets

Submitted by acohill on Fri, 06/05/2009 - 07:44

The CrunchPad may be available soon, and it is likely to be just one of many competitors to the newly emerging tablet market. The Amazon Kindle will be remembered as the first, but like many first to market devices, it may not outlast the competition. The CrunchPad is an inexpensive (projected to sell for $299) tablet designed primarily for Web browsing, but it is likely it can or will do more over time. The obvious other application would be viewing PDFs, which would put squarely in competition with the Kindle, which was designed primarily for ebooks.

We are all going to end up with a tablet, and the big loser will be laptop makers. I don't really need to lug around a five pound laptop while traveling. I need to check email, access the Web, and do presentations--all things an inexpensive tablet can do with low power processors and no hard drive.

Expect to see lots of new business models emerge around the tablet as well. AT&T got the religion early with the enormous success of the iPhone, which has captured an enormous segment of the mobile Web traffic out of all proportion to its market share--because it does a great job as a Web browsing device. AT&T is planning a tablet device that either has 3G wireless connectivity built in and/or simply accesses the AT&T wireless network via a companion AT&T cellphone.

Amazon's business model is based on selling books. And I'd be amazed if there are not some news publishers looking at including a tablet as part of a newspaper (newstablet?) subscription. In fact, a smart newspaper would look at selling newstablets at a lost (e.g. $99) and then drastically cutting the cost of a daily news subscription.

We're still only baby steps into the Information Revolution and the Knowledge Economy, but low cost, high performance broadband access is going to make the world go round. Communities that lack the telecom infrastructure to enable these emerging devices are going to see their business and jobs growth head into negative numbers.