Sony launched its first tablet computers in an ambitious attempt to grab the second spot in the market more than a year after Apple’s iPad revolutionized mobile computing.
The gadgets will use an operating system based on Google’s Android 3.0, said Kunimasa Suzuki, deputy president of the consumer products and services group.
These will be the first tablets to enable the use of PlayStation games, said Suzuki, who produced one of the glossy black devices from his jacket pocket during a media launch yesterday.
Photo: Bloomberg
Suzuki raised eyebrows in January when he told reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that Sony was aiming for the No. 2 spot in the tablet market within a year even though it had yet to put a product on the market.
“That effectively means they have to beat Samsung, which is a very tough rival,” said Nobuo Kurahashi, an analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities in Tokyo. “Although this is an interesting product, they have already been left behind in televisions, so it’s not going to be easy.”
Kazuo Hirai, seen as a likely successor to chief executive Howard Stringer, made his first public appearance yesterday since the gaming division chief was promoted to the No. 2 position last month.
Sales of tablet devices are expected to quadruple to about 294 million units between this year and 2015, with almost half that Android-based, research firm Gartner has forecast.
Sony’s tablets, codenamed S1 and S2, are WiFi and 3G/4G compatible. The S1 has a 9.4-inch display and is designed to make it easier to hold for long periods of time, Sony said. The S2 has two 5.5-inch displays in a clamshell design.
The company, which had been criticized for failing to come up with a tablet offering after iPad’s launch in April last year, has emphasized the need to differentiate its tablet from rivals, even if that takes time.
“Although it’s a late-comer in the market, it has potential as what you need is just one big uniqueness that can sell to customers be it design or whatever,” said Lee Sun-tae, an analyst at Meritz Securities in Seoul.
In a bid to tap burgeoning demand, competitors including Samsung Electronics — whose Galaxy Tab is Apple’s strongest competitor in the tablet market — and Motorola, LG Electronics and HTC are flooding the market with tablets running Android.
Shares in Sony, which unveils its quarterly results on May 26, fell 2.1 percent yesterday.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts