Nvidia's CEO is not pleased with the cool reception Android tablets have gotten so far. And he expressed frustration over marketing gaffes in an interview with CNET earlier this week.
Sales of the first Android Honeycomb tablet, the Motorola Xoom, have not been impressive when compared with those of the iPad. Though Motorola claimed in late April that Xoom shipments hit 250,000, that number is far lower than the total being enjoyed by market leader Apple, which sold about 1 million iPad 2 tablets in the first weekend of sales alone.
During an earnings conference call, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, articulated part of the problem, saying, "Consumers want more apps for Android tablets."
That's not the whole story, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who I chatted with on Thursday. Nvidia's Tegra 2 is the core piece of silicon inside Honeycomb tablets, including the Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.
"It's a point of sales problem. It's an expertise at retail problem. It's a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem," he said, for starters.
Though Huang didn't mention the $499 starting price for the iPad, it was clear that this was a reference point. "The baseline configuration included 3G when it shouldn't have," he said. "Tablets should have a Wi-Fi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones," he said. … Read more
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