Tablet PC will be the spotlight during Computex 2010

TAIWAN: According to DRAMeXchange, strong netbook growth credit to the PC market in 2009 since netbook has featured with affordable price with performance. 2009 netbook shipment is recorded in 28 million units with 172 percent YoY growth.DRAMeXchange expects that netbook has reached the peak at 2009. With the declining ASP and low margin, PC-OEMs will re-focus on regular notebooks due to the preferred performance. The 2010 netbook market size is expected at 36 million units with 27.2 percent YoY growth.

Meanwhile, the Apple iPad, launched at April, is generally taken as the tablet PC. Many PC-OEMs will start to penetrate into tablet PC market given the shining iPad.

The tablet PC had been launched back to 2000 and targeted itself as the niche product. Due to the higher price, heavy weight, unsatisfactory battery endurance, lack back up for wireless and 3G connection, the tablet PC development is limited. The iPad has been positioned differently with the emphasis being more on friendly user interface, strong application and matured telecom support.

Apple believes that iPad will create a new space between smartphone and notebook. Compared with a million units sold in 74 days for iPhone, it took only less than a month for iPad to reach one million units sold. DRAMeXchange expects that the 1H10 iPad shipment should be around 1.7 million units while 7~8 million will be aimed for 2010 overall.

According to DRAMeXchange, the tablet PC is featured differently from netbook in fundamental. Consumers with higher demanded in office work will still prefer to use netbook as the computing device. However, users with higher demand in entertainment with internet browsing and simple tasking will choose tablet PC.

The iPad offers brand new using experience in terms of multi-touch and software/hardware application rather than netbook. We believe tablet PC will be more competitively advantaged with it can support multi-tasking and Flash player, which will result in the strong impact for competing with netbook.

Generally speaking, DRAMeXchange sees seldom overlapping customer base from netbook and tablet PC. That is, DRAMeXchange expects that the tablet PC will create another new market after netbook.

Intel, Asus and Acer will plan to launch and demonstrate the tablet PC products in Computex at this June. Also, Google will cooperate with Verizon on new tablet PC to compete with ipad. With the new joint and new structure that many companies are dedicating, tablet PC is expected to be another spotlight in PC world.