First look at the OGT Tablet — the world's thinnest Android tablet
the world's thinnest Android tablet — Ask any analyst, technophile, or blogger — this summer we expect a plethora of Android tablets. Some will be good, some not so much, but the OGT Tablet is something we're going to be keeping our eye on.
Context & Ripple Effects
The OGT Tablet arrives into a category that has been previewed piecemeal for over a year: Gizmodo rounded up the five most promising tablets back in September 2010 (five of the best tablets revealed so far), and Notion Ink had already shown how a Tegra-powered Android slate could differentiate on display technology in late 2009 (Notion Ink's Pixel Qi smartpad). What has changed by April 2011 is the platform's position — Android has just overtaken the iPhone in smartphone market share, and commentary through March framed Android's momentum as a 'freight train' bearing down on RIM.
Against that backdrop, Android Central's first look at the OGT Tablet — billed as the world's thinnest Android tablet — matters less for the device itself than for what it signals: licensees are now competing on industrial design rather than on the OS, ahead of the summer flood of Android tablets the site expects.
First-order effects
- OGT stakes out thinness as its differentiator before the summer 2011 Android tablet wave lands, forcing early comparisons against every other slate in preview rather than against shipping products.
- Buyers shopping the coming tablet crop get a new spec axis — chassis thickness — on top of the screen-size and price comparisons that dominated the 2010 previews.
Second-order effects
- Rival Android licensees entering this summer face pressure to match or beat the thinnest claim, pushing orders toward suppliers of slim displays, batteries and enclosures who become the bottleneck for the whole category.
- Vendors that cannot win on hardware design are pushed toward price cuts or bundling, since a shared OS removes software as a differentiator — the same dynamic that has driven the iPhone-versus-Android fan war all year.
Third-order effects
- If Android's smartphone share momentum carries into tablets as analysts predicted for 2011, the long-run structure points to commoditized Android software with competition concentrated entirely in hardware design and brand — squeezing smaller players like RIM, already cast as the train's target in March commentary.
The trend: Android's smartphone-era momentum is spilling into tablets, where licensees increasingly compete on industrial design — thinness first — because the operating system itself offers no edge.