Many of us here at StreakSmart have been anxiously awaiting Dell’s 10-inch Streak 10 Pro tablet, which features Android 3.1 Honeycomb and Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core processor.
Unfortunately, unless you live in China, I wouldn’t count on getting your hands on a Streak 10 Pro anytime soon. Why? Because Dell has announced that the tablet will be launching this summer in China . . . that the US wouldn’t see it until next year.
While this is startlingly bad news from a US-based Streak blogger’s standpoint, it does begin to make sense when you look at things from Dell’s point of view.
Dell stated that the American market isn’t mature enough for the launch of an Android tablet to be successful. According to the manager of Dell’s mobility division, John Thode, “This is not an either-or for us. This is a choice about where is the best place to take our story and avoids a bunch of the inhibitors and barriers to success that we’ve seen in the US market.” Such inhibitors include confusion about what exactly Android is and stupidly high tablet adoption prices.
Thode later added, “Instead of trying to swim upstream [Dell should] go someplace where the growth rates are much more interesting, the adoption rates are much faster, the consumer is much more savvy.” The decision to initially launch the tablet in China, Dell’s second-largest market, then became clear.
Dell more than likely made the right decision in this scenario, but it also means that we here at StreakSmart likely won’t have our hands on a Streak 10 Pro for a long time.
[CNET]
Well that will make the shipment faster for sure~ right beside the manufacturing plants…
welcome to my website
Why do I get the feeling this is the end of the Streak and they are using China as the dumping ground.
I probably was not going to buy one any way. As long as I can keep my PC going. Just don’t need it. Doesn’t mean I don’t want one. Peace
So, China actually has more people ready to put down $500-700 for a tablet than America has? They know more about tablets and have had their hands on them much more often than we unsophisticated Americans have.
I suppose the brilliant marketing team at Dell figured that out by counting the large number of Apple Ipads sold in China (greater than those sold in America???).
Those savvy Chinese consumers will be spending $100-$200 to buy the machine that looks like the Ipad or the Playbook well before they even think about the Dell.
And just to be sure, take a poll on the strange term ‘Android’ and see what percentage has a hand on that…..
No wonder all the marketing (none) surrounding what is really a very good piece of hardware was absolutely horrible.
China is a developing very quickly country, the national population is large. No doubt that many people look to there.
There isn’t much of a recession in China… And the market is getting very sophisticated there too – more influenced by word of mouth than expert opinion, I suspect. Brand loyalty to Apple is also less likely.
This is just a choice about where is the best place to take our story and avoids a bunch of the inhibitors.