Dell Pans iPad as Too Complex, Costly for Business

A Dell executive is attracting a massive amount of attention for suggesting the Apple iPad will eventually bomb in the enterprise.

“Apple is great if you’ve got a lot of money and live on an island,” Andy Lark, who leads the global marketing efforts for Dell’s Large Enterprise Group, told CIO Australia in a March 28 interview. “It’s not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things become quite complex.”

Part of the iPad’s Achilles Heel, he continued, was the cost of the tablet with accessories: “An iPad with a keyboard, a mouse and a case [means] you’ll be at $1,500 or $1,600; that’s double of what you’re paying. … That’s not feasible.”

Questions aside of why one would need a mouse to navigate a touch-screen interface, Lark also advocated Dell’s strategy for the tablet space. “We’ve taken a very considered approach to tablets, given that the vast majority of our business isn’t in the consumer space,” he said. “We’ve got a far more diversified footprint than some of these players.”

Dell has taken something of a meandering path into the tablet market. In August 2010, the manufacturer released the 5-inch Streak to the U.S. market. Running Google Android, and capable of making phone calls, the device seemed to suffer something of an identity crisis: Was it a very small tablet, or a larger smartphone?

Dell obviously hoped the original Streak would appeal to an audience in the market for both types of device—and seemed willing to take the risk that, in attempting to hit that sweet spot between the two, the Streak would end up an also-ran in the tablet and smartphone categories.

In any case, Dell soon went back to the proverbial drawing board and produced the Dell Streak 7, a 7-inch tablet clearly designed to compete with the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Research In Motion’s upcoming PlayBook. Like the other Android tablets hitting the market at the time, the Streak 7 runs Android 2.2 (or “Froyo”), which was developed for smartphones’ smaller screens; as the device reached store shelves, Dell promised “over-the-air” software updates in the future, presumably to the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 (or “Honeycomb”).

For more, read the eWEEK article: Dell Exec: Apple’s iPad Too Expensive and Complex for Businesses.