Well the latest earnings call with Apple sure had a lot of words to quote. And soon after discussing sales etc the question was put to Phil and Tim, How do you see iPad competitors? And Tim Cook has no hesitation in replying it seems. Quoting from Engadget’s live blog:
if you look at what’s out there today, there’s not much. There’s the ones that use Windows, they’re generally big and heavy and expensive. They have weak battery life, they require a keyboard and style. Customers are just frankly not interested. Then you have Android tablets, and the operating system wasn’t designed for tablets. Google has said this, this isn’t just Apple saying this. That means you have the size of a tablet that just isn’t reasonable for what we call a ‘real tablet experience.’ That’s just a scaled-up smartphone, which is a bizarre product category. If you do a side-by-side with an iPad, you’ll pick an iPad.
And then the CES was all about tablets. How could Tim not speak about Honeycomb? Well he didn’t name Honeycomb, but referred it as ‘next generation’. He highihged that its not shipping anytime soon. Here is the quote again:
the next generation, which we saw at CES, they’re not shipping yet. They lack performance specs, shipping info, pricing. They’re vapor. We’ll see. But we’re not sitting still, and we have an incredible first mover advantage, and a big advantage with the App Store. We’re very confident in entering into a fight with anyone.
Apple sure has a lot of Google love to share and this probably just scratches the surface. Tim and co are sure ready to answer Jobs related Q and Google it seems.