Apple iPad
Having shipped over 2 million pieces worldwide within a few months of its release, Apples’s latest sensation the iPad is taking the netbook / mini laptop world by storm and there have been serious debates among avid PC market watchers whether it will erode the latter’s market share.
At the recent D8 conference at Los Angeles, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc, likened tablet PCs to the early days of trucks and cars. As the economy developed, more people replaced cars with trucks and similar evolution is going on in the PC / mobile computing market. Even though PCs with Windows XP operating system are the most popular computing device worldwide today, that situation is likely to change over the next decade or so with mobile computing devices slowly taking over.
Leading the way would be devices like the iPad and its clones that are likely to enter the market shortly. Dell with its Streak tablet PC and Samsung with iPad like clones hitting the market, the market for powerful mobile computers is only going to widen. Hence it would be no exaggeration to say that iPad has created a whole new market segment of smart mobile phones packed with power and the thin line between netbooks / mini laptops and smart phones has already started to blur.
