The Tablet War Begins Now

The year 2011 has been defined by industry analysts as the year of tablet market consolidation. Despite the arrival of exciting new products like the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motoroloa Xoom, the Apple iPad, which the new version will be presented in a few days in San Francisco, firmly will continue to dominate the sales charts.

According to a recent Gartner study, around 55 million tablets will be sold over the year. In this scenario, the iPad will continue to maintain its advantage over other similar devices on the market.

This prediction is very realistic. It appears that the major competitors of the giant of Cupertino have not yet understood that it is impossible to obtain a significant competitive advantage only through the introduction of new hardware.

The dominance of the market will be increasingly determined by the existence of an ecosystem of hardware, software, developers, users, which will be the discriminating factor for the success of one product over another.

And it is precisely for this reason that, iPad aside, the real strength of Apple is the huge universe of applications available in the App Store that makes the iPad much more attractive than other alternatives and is the biggest barriers to entry to all other Apple’s competitors.