NVIDIA blames everyone (except NVIDIA) for lackluster Android tablet sales
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang blames everyone for poor Android tablet sales. Well, everyone except NVIDIA.
NVIDIA makes the Tegra 2 chip used in Android 'Honeycomb' tablets, but in an interview with CNet, Huang spreads the blame pretty much everyone and everything for lackluster interest and sales:
"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."
"The baseline configuration included 3G when it shouldn't have. Tablets should have a Wi-Fi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones."
"And it's a software richness of content problem."
In other words, it has nothing to do with NVIDIA or its silicon.
Or does it? After all, benchmarks putting the iPad 2 head-to-head with Tegra 2-based hardware, Android tablets have not come out on top. Here are two examples:
For those of you of a tl;dr disposition, the upshot of the benchmark tests is that the iPad 2's A5 processor trounces the Tergra 2.
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While I do believe that Apple does a better job than any other tablet maker of explaining why people should buy an iPad (or more specifically, what they can do with and iPad) compared to Android tablet OEMs, the fact that Tegra 2 is so readily outperformed by Apple's A5 processor doesn't help sell Android tablets to professionals, geeks and techies.
Tegra 3 is in the pipeline, but that doesn't help Android tablets in the now.