About time someone built a real competitor to Apple’s iPad.

There's no denying Apple is the king of the tablets with an enormous and phenomenal 93% market share. With a year or so head-start, Apple is finally starting to get some competition in the Motorola XOOM and Samsung Galaxy Tab. But, with the iPad 2 about to be released in a week to much fanfare, I simply cannot see the iPad going down anytime soon.

The iPad’s success has been attributed to two important factors, exclusivity and the fact that Apple’s competitors are simply playing catch-up.

If there's one thing that Apple has been really great at this past decade, it's been making their products exclusive. People would buy a Mac, not because it's necessarily better than the competition, but because you get the Mac experience, people buy an iPod because they get the iPod experience and they can tell people they have an iPod.

The problem with both of the iPad’s current main competitors (Samsung and Motorola) is that despite their superior hardware offerings, they’re both just another two Android tablets floating in what we call, ‘the sea of sameness’.

Galaxy Tab and Xoom chilling in the sea of sameness.

Phil Molyneux, president of Sony Electronics spoke briefly in a press meeting about avoiding the ‘sea of sameness’. He spoke of entering an electronics store and being confronted by a wall of LCD TV’s of different brand and sizes and wondering how to decide which to purchase, this is what he referred to as the ‘sea of sameness’.

I’m going to take this a step further - walk into any electronics store and you’ll see a line of computers and then a Mac section, you’ll see a line of MP3 players, and then an iPod section, and soon enough I reckon we will be seeing a line of Android tablets, and then an iPad section. This is exactly what I’m talking about when I refer to exclusivity, Apple products aren’t necessarily better, but they are different in a good way.

Both the Galaxy Tab and Xoom are both superior devices on a pure spec front, but how many consumers really care about the amount of RAM inside or the processor used. In the end, the Galaxy Tab and Xoom are just another two Android tablets essentially worth forgetting. Apple products on the other hand target the average consumer market, not the consumer who will go ‘Oh dam a Tegra 2! I’m sold’ or ‘’Goddammit, why do you have to use Android 2.1 and not 3.0 Honeycomb’. Apple targets the consumer that will walk into the store and look at a product and say, ‘Whoa, that’s cool’, and say it after trying the product, not after looking at the spec sheet. It’s the exclusive Apple experience that sells a product.

I’ve always been a firm believer of one of my own sayings,

‘don’t sell what a consumer is buying, sell what a consumer wants’. 

Right now, iPads, clearly are what consumers are buying, it’s time that someone built a tablet that is a real competitor to the iPad, not just an imitation. Unless one is willing to take a risk and take a path entirely perpendicular to Apple’s,  there’s absolutely no reason why your average consumer would purchase anything over an iPad.