Nvidia CEO 'not pleased' with Android tablet sales

Written by Antony Leather

May 16, 2011 | 12:12

Tags: #android #honeycomb #ios #ipad #tegra

Companies: #apple #motorola #nvidia

The iPad's sales have surprised many, exacerbating the disappointment of the sales figures for Android-based tablets - a fact shared by Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang.

In an interview with CNET, Huang is stated as being 'not pleased with the cool reception' that Android tablets have received so far.

The new Android Honeycomb-based Motorola Xoom tablet, which uses Nvidia's Tegra 2 hardware, had sales far below those of the iPad 2. While Motorola claims that 250,000 units were sold in the period between the tablet's launch in February and the end of April, iPad 2 sales were around the 1 million mark in just the first weekend.

Huang stated '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. And it's a software richness of content problem.' Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility cited a lack of apps as being one of the main reasons for poor sales.

Interestingly, Huang voiced concerns over the price and configuration of non-iPad rivals his company had hardware stakes in. 'The baseline configuration included 3G when it shouldn't have... Tablets should have a WiFi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones.'

It wasn't all doom and gloom for Honeycomb, though, with Huang apparently being stunned at the rate at which the tablets were improving, with future products solving many of the issues of the first generation of Android tablets.

Do you think Android tablets will ever be able to compete with the iPad and the weight of Apple's App Store, or were they doomed from the start? Let us know in the forum.
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