Tactile tablets: Intel confident in the long term

Paul Otellini, Intel CEO, believes that they are capable of dominating the emerging tactile tablet’s market. But his strategy is based on the long term.

Intel’s CEO doesn’t seem too concerned about getting a strong foothold in the tactile tablet’s market, although he does warn that it will take time. Not long ago, he recognised that the company was running late on the development of mobile processors that are capable of meeting these new needs, leading to a low presence in a take off market.

It is their competitor ARM who has mainly benefitted from the growing market, with it still being unclear whether they will be able to maintain their position or will end up giving up market share to others, like what is currently happening with netbooks.

Paul Otellini has also found some other similarities between tablets and netbooks. He doesn’t believe that tablets will eat into computer sales. He instead believes that some sales around the edges will be nibbled on, like what netbooks did when first taking off, without any real risk to the computer processor market.


Intel has the financial position to wait for their time
But in the end, Intel is looking to be present in all of these markets as they see real growth opportunities and don’t consider these new devices to be competitors to their existing products, but rather complimentary.

In the meantime, while tablets operating Intel processors are almost non-existent, Paul Otellini has made it know that he is ready to throw a significant amount of resources at this field so as to offer adapted solutions, notably in terms of energy use – a point on which they currently have trouble rivalling the ARM architectures, while also be capable of operating different platforms - Windows, as well as Android and MeeGo: the OS developed in conjunction with Nokia.

The ARM/Windows combination doesn’t work very well, or at least not as well as the Atom/Windows pairing, even if it’s not as efficient in energy use, with the chipset manufacturer hoping to correct this for the future Atom releases.

This is something which they may be able to build on once the market is better structured, and when Apple’s iPad is no longer the product of reference in the segment. In the meantime, he concedes that "Apple has done some excellent work in reinventing the category.