3G tablet sales 'very slow,' analyst says

11.07.2011
Sales of 3G cellular-equipped tablets have largely been a bust because consumers don't want to pay wireless carriers for another data plan on top of their data plans for smartphones, an IDG analyst said on Friday.

"The 3G thing on tablets is bogus," Bob O'Donnell, an IDG analyst, told Computerworld. "Nobody wants to pay for that data."

He said "hundreds of thousands" of 3G-ready tablets are sitting unsold in inventory at carrier stores and other retailers in the U.S. because tablet customers far prefer buying a tablet to work over Wi-Fi instead of 3G cellular.

"Sales of 3G tablets have been very slow," O'Donnell said, basing his insight on interviews with several large tablet makers, including Motorola and Samsung.

"TabletsTablets are a different animal than smartphones and are much more like a typical computer where you tend to sit in one place using Wi-Fi to work," O'Donnell said. Alles zu Tablets auf CIO.de

Because 3G tablets haven't sold well, U.S. carriers will need to change their pricing plans for data, combining data plans to cover a family of devices instead of just a single device for a data plan, O'Donnell said. He predicted carriers will do just that, sometime in the fall.

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