This week, we have a number of data reports on market developments, especially in MDM, with news on the tablet and smartphone markets. The news that Huawei has displaced Apple as the second largest supplier in smartphones seems to me something of an inflection point and an indicator of a trend in the future. BOE is now the largest panel supplier and Huawei is second in smartphones – the move to Chinese domination is continuing. Samsung, on the other hand, is not having a good time with its Galaxy 9 and 9+ doing less well than the company had hoped. It is also still having a hard time in the premium end of the TV market. Of course, Samsung remains a huge presence and a key player. The company remains a long way behind Apple in tablets and has slipped back in share since last year. It has announced new tablet products (S4 and Tab A) this week that look as though they should be quite competitive.
The new S4 tablet features support for Samsung’s Dex environment for productivity apps and support for multitasking. With the attached keyboard, it becomes a reasonably competitive productivity tool compared to entry level notebooks. Many of the developments in the tablet market such as the Microsoft Surface Go (which has been winning some positive reviews) are aimed at making tablets more effective at challenging the low end of the traditional notebook market and really moving away from the original concept of the tablet as a media consumption device. I remain convinced that one of the reasons for this is that Apple really got things very right for media consumption even with the first iPad. Since then, there have only been limited changes in the use cases for tablets, and this is the reason for the lack of growth in the market in recent years.
Of course, if foldable smartphones turn into a market, that may really chip away at the smaller end of the tablet market as displays in smartphones become effectively larger. I do sometimes carry a tablet as well as a smartphone, but if I had a foldable smartphone, I wouldn’t bother with the tablet at all. My current one (an oldish Tab S, as it had such a gorgeous OLED display) was a bad purchase. To keep the price down, I bought one with insufficient storage and spend half my time managing the deletion of applications to allow updates! However, as a useful display for watching OTT video (especially useful when my wife wants to keep up with her soaps while we’re on holiday), it’s still an excellent unit.
Quite a few commentators and reviewers have said that the Dex technology being used on a tablet makes more sense than on a smartphone. I’m not entirely convinced about this. A 10.5″ display is very small for productivity applications, although the resolution is certainly adequate. It seems to me that having this kind of facility on a smartphone, when connected to a monitor that is large enough for content creation, makes more sense mainly because most people carry their smartphones with them at all times. The smartphone will be the access point or storage device, not the tablet, it seems to me.
At the moment, Huawei is still behind Samsung in tablets in volume share, but at the current rate of progress, it will be larger than Samsung unless Samsung can change things radically in the tablet space. The Tab S4 looks like a good product, but on its own doesn’t look good enough to change the direction of the market.
The Tab S4 goes back from 4:3 to 16:10 aspect
