Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang acknowledged that Google and his company are behind in the tablet race against Apple’s iPad, but was wildly bullish about designs in the pipeline.
How bullish? We’ll let Huang do the talking. He was speaking on Nvidia’s third quarter earnings conference call. Huang was talking Tegra, Nvidia’s smartphone and tablet chips.
He said:
We’re going to start building into our phone and tablet design wins. And although they’re a little bit behind, the work that Google and Andy Rubin’s team is doing at Google is just really amazing. I mean, this is clearly a world-class engineering team. And they’re building a magical product. So I’m looking forward to the next generation of Android phones and tablets that are coming out. And I think it’s going to really, really surprise people and delight consumers everywhere. And so although it’s a little bit behind, I think it’s going to be completely fabulous. Now it’s going to take something absolutely great to compete against the iPad and the iPhone, as we all know. Because both of those devices are quite amazing devices. And so it’s going to take something that is truly remarkable to compete against it. And I think Andy and his team, and all of our engineers here working with them, and all of our partners around the world working on it, are going to absolutely deliver. And so that’s the second thing.
Huang has one thing right. The latest designs of Android tablets can’t hang with the iPad. However, Huang said that more software and more power will be packed onto tablets. As they do tablets will become the dominant computing device, eclipsing notebooks and netbooks.
He added:
We know at this point that the projects that we’re working on, particularly in the tablets, has taken longer than we expected. And it’s taken longer than we expected by a few months. But the important thing is that you can’t just build a tablet. You can’t just put an operating system on a tablet and hope that — on a piece of glass and hope that you’re going to compete against the iPad. The iPad is a wonderful product. And if you’re going to give that wonderful product a run for its money, you better build something absolutely exquisite. And so whether it’s the quality of the work of the craftsmanship that our teams are working on, or the capabilities of these devices, they have to be absolutely ground-breaking or why would anybody come to buy them? So I think that the extra time that was necessary to build these devices, and build the operating system and all the applications and the system software necessary to do it — and obviously, we’re not going to talk about what they are right now, but they’re going to be absolutely magical. And so I think that that’s the important thing to realize. And I think that although we’re a little bit late, the market potential is so huge, and this is the future of computing. This is the second device into the future of computing.
