I was reading all news relative to UMPCs today when I found this article from DailyTech reporting about OnlyUmpc’s R2H review. The whole article was ok until I read the following note:
While UMPCs are intriguing devices, they haven’t quite lived up to expectations when it comes to sales. The high price of entry is one of the reasons and meager battery life is yet another. With customers having access to $500 notebooks from reputable manufacturers, $1,000 for a UMPC seems like a hard pill to swallow.
I wonder, how this person knows how many units have been sold by Samsung, Sony, TabletKiosk, Amtek and now Asus. If you ask me, I would say that sales are going well because in many forums relative to UMPCs all I can see are users saying that they can’t find where to buy them the majority of times, or that they are waiting for their orders to be shipped. And in another hand I have read news like this one posted at UltramobileBlog:
Earlier, Intel had suggested that the chip would become available by the end of this decade, however, with the success of the ultra mobiles and greater expectations for further growth in the market Intel is now making plans to have the chip ready sometime in 2008.
So who is right? Intel investing in these new “intriguing devices” or Brandon Hill from DailyTech? I agree that prices have to go down a little bit and I’m sure that they will. Every time we see a new toy released prices are high and after few months prices go down to a “normal” level. Another fact that will make these devices cheaper in the future is the implementation of new technologies in displays and batteries. But all this needs time. If you don’t have the money to buy one or you just don’t have the real need for one of these “intriguing devices” that does not mean that people are not buying them.
What do you think?
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I think it’s “conventional wisdom” that tablets and UMPCs don’t sell well. And, as usual with “conventional wisdom”, it’s probably wrong. Certainly Tablet PCs didn’t exactly jump off the shelves when they were first introduced although from what I’ve seen sales are improving. I think a lot of less-informed tech writers assume that the same must be true of UMPCs, without any evidence to back that up.
Of course a phrase like “hasn’t live up to expectations” is generally worthless on its face, anyway. Whose expectations? What are those expectations? It’s typically a filler statement, used when a writer has no empirical data.