Playing at home
The tablet market is in the process of evolving from one major player to many. While Apple remains the dominant force in this nascent market, it's being joined by a flood of Android-based competitors, and even Windows is starting to appear at a competitive price.
But the problem for the Android players is differentiation. The mobile OEMs have been quickest to get on the Android 3.0 bandwagon, but not only are they struggling to differentiate themselves from each other, they're also being pushed on price by Apple. PC OEMs are taking a bit longer to join the party, and you have to wonder how they will make their tablets stand out - especially if they're not even Honeycombed yet.
Maybe that's less of a problem if you're the market leader in China - the world's largest market. That's exactly the position PC-maker Lenovo is in, and it seems entirely reasonable that its focuses its attention on that market, as it has done with the LePad tablet.
Right now the only information it has published is on its Chinese-language website, but a few other media have reported on the launch. The FT says it's a 10.1 inch device with a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. PCW, meanwhile, reckons it's a 1.3 GHz chip (probably the QSD8x50A), the OS is Android 2.2, and will start at 3,499 yuan (US$534).
These specs and price make it even more imperative that Lenovo plays to its geographic strengths. In the FT story an analyst makes the point that Lenovo has a lead in Chinese interfaces and applications. While the iPad is already available in China, it could be that localisation trumps shininess in the Chinese market and the Lenovo could have an insurmountable head-start over its competitors in that respect.
And for the same reason, we'd be surprised to see Lenovo make too much of an effort to launch the LePad outside of China anytime soon. It would be much wiser, we think, to play to its strengths and watch the Western tablet market evolve over the course of this year before committing too much time and money to a global launch.
