PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
While it has been reported that global PC sales are plummeting, global demand for tablets is growing fast.
Taiwan-based supply chain sources have told DigiTimes that they believe this increase in popularity will see vendors adopting plastic chassis for entry-level tablets in a bid to minimise production costs and retail prices.
As more and more vendors join the entry-level tablet market, the sources believe prices may drop to under $100 (around £65) by the end of the year.
“Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by ‘cannibalising’ PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.
“Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC. There will be some individuals who retain both, but we believe they will be exception and not the norm. Therefore, we hypothesise that buyers will not replace secondary PCs in the household, instead allowing them to age out and shifting consumption to a tablet.”
Could we be seeing plastic entry-level tablets from Asus, Amazon and Google by the end of 2013? If IDC’s recent report about the slump in PC sales is anything to go by, manufacturers will be looking to gain as much of the mobile device market as possible.
Tablet stack image via ShutterStock.com
