Apple's iPad continues to top Consumer Reports' ratings, despite new Android challengers on the market.
Apple's iPad
remains on the top of
Consumer Reports'
list of best tablets, despite some new Android tablets.
"We've added
five new tablets to our ratings, and while some were noteworthy for reasons of
their own, none rose to the challenge the iPad continues to present to its
competitors," the publication wrote in a Sept. 23 note to media.
Of the 9- to
12-inch tablets currently on the market,
Consumer
Reports ranks the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 with WiFi (the 32GB version) as
its top Android-based model, followed by the Motorola Xoom, the Asus EeePad
Transformer, the Motorola Xoom WiFi and the T-Mobile G-Slate.
Among 7- to
8-inch models, the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Samsung Galaxy Tab with WiFi ranked
first and second, respectively, followed by Research In Motion's PlayBook, the
HTC Flyer Tablet and the ViewSonic ViewPad 7.
In its new "Electronics
Buying Guide,"
Consumer Reports claims
it received Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad and the Toshiba Thrive "too late for
full testing."
Analysts
generally see the iPad as dominating the tablet market for the near future.
"We do not
expect iPad 3 this year, but there's no rush," J.P. Morgan analyst Mark
Moskowitz wrote in a Sept. 19 research note excerpted on
Fortune. "The other tablet entrants have
stumbled. Offerings by [Motorola Mobility] and [Research In Motion] have been
the latest disappointments. Also, we had the opportunity to demo Sony's tablet
before its launch. We were not impressed."
Longer term,
research firm Gartner also suggested that the iPad will continue to hold the
lion's share of the market-although it will eventually lose more ground to
Android.
"We expect
Apple to maintain a market share lead throughout our forecast period by
commanding more than 50 percent of the market until 2014," Carolina Milanesi,
research vice president at Gartner, wrote in a Sept. 22 statement accompanying
a research note. "This is because Apple delivers a superior and unified user
experience across its hardware, software and services."
Competitors
need to offer something similar, she added, if they want to carve away market
share from Apple. "Apple had the foresight to create this market and in doing
that planned for it as far as component supplies such as memory and screen,"
Milanesi wrote. "This allowed Apple to bring the iPad out at a very competitive
price and no compromise in experience among the different models."
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