Apple fans hoping for an iPad 3 this year should just cool their jets, one analyst advises. There’s “no rush” to unveil a new version as rival devices stumble left and right. As Simon & Garfunkel might say: Slow down, you move too fast.
“In our view, Apple should be in no rush,” JP Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz told investors Friday. There’s no need as no real tablet rival exists. “The other tablet entrants have stumbled so far, and that trend-line could persist deep into 2012,” Moskowitz writes.
That belief was reinforced Thursday, when PlayBook maker Research in Motion announced it had shipped just 200,000 of its tablets during the last quarter. Not only is that far fewer than the 9.25 million iPads Apple sold during the same period, RIM failed to even match its previous quarter, when it shipped 500,000 PlayBooks. As in the case of the HP TouchPad, the PlayBook will likely be discounted in an effort to get the tablets off the shelves of anxious retailers.
But what about the tablet from Sony? Some expected it to challenge the iPad. Once again, the iPad’s look-and-feel is the standard against which every other tablet must measure up. “To us, Sony’s tablet lack’s the refined, sleek feel of the iPad and its bezel-like back is not user-friendly,” the analyst writes.
But the real stumbling block for rivals is Android. Moskowitz believes Google is better off sticking with powering phones.
“Lastly, the Sony tablet runs on the Android O/S, which has failed to garner as much interest in tablets as it has in smartphones.” In other words, for rivals to succeed against the iPad, they should probably ditch Android. All of which should make Apple pretty happy. Or, in the words of Simon & Garfunkel: “Feelin’ Groovy.”
