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Were Apple’s rivals watching closely as it unveiled the iPad 2 last week? You bet they were. Samsung has become one of the first to publicly say its own tablet strategy may be getting a tweak as a direct result of Apple’s second-generation slate.
Korean news agency Yonhap has an interview with Lee Don-joo, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile division, in which he admits that the iPad 2 has made the company take a long hard look at its own Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet, which was unveiled at Mobile World Congress last month.
“We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,” he says. “Apple made it very thin… The 10-inch (tablet) was to be priced higher than the 7-inch (tablet) but we will have to think that over.”
We should note at this point that Samsung has been stung by mistranslated quotes from Korean executives in the recent past. In January, the company’s claim that sales of its original Galaxy Tab were “quite smooth” somehow became “quite small” by the time it had been translated for Western news sites — a quote that was even used in Apple’s iPad 2 presentation last week by a gleeful Steve Jobs.
In the new instance, though, Lee Don-joo’s quotes are in Yonhap’s own English translation of its interview with the executive, so for now we must take them at face value. It’s a surprising admission for a consumer electronics company to make publicly, though.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is 10.9mm thick, as opposed to the iPad 2’s 8.8mm. In the US, the original Galaxy Tab has an unlocked list price of $999.99 (£613) on Amazon, although that site is currently selling it for a knockdown $544.94 (£334). If Samsung really was planning to sell the Galaxy Tab 10.1 for more than the original model, that rethink sounds like a good idea.
