Fierce Tablet Competition Forces Tablet Accessory Providers

This month we have been bombarded with headlines about the current turmoil running rife within the tablet device market. Apple vs Samsung, Samsung vs Apple, Microsoft's new mobile OS vs everyone... It's getting a little nasty.
In early 2011 many of us were surprised to hear that Hewlett-Packard were to withdraw from the tablet market, considering their slump in PC sales; we have since seen massive price reductions on HP tabs with Best Buy offering them in the UK for as little as ￡89.
RIM's BlackBerry PlayBooks haven't had much more luck either, their manufacturers Quanta have had to reduce staff numbers. In case you didn't know, Quanta is the largest manufacturer of notebooks in the world; they were forced to cut staff at their Taiwanese plant from 3,000 to some 2,000 in the face of declining orders for the 'PlayBook'. The first quarter of 2011 saw shipments of 500,000 devices, whereas the second quarter saw just 200,000 units shipped; making their annual targets of 4-5 million units looking highly unlikely. We have yet to see whether or not they will consider producing a second generation PlayBook considering the poor demand.
To add to the brawl, a court ruling in Germany saw sales of the Samsung Tab 10.1 banned indefinitely across the country in a bitter legal dispute between Samsung and Apple. Samsung is now rumoured to be seeking to ban iPhone 5 sales in Korea with a similar motion after they lost the claim of 'slimmest smartphone' on English soil.
Amidst the fierce legal suits, cruel competition and a fickle consumer market, the companies that provide the accessories for these devices are left to re-think their approach; tactically selecting product lines that they feel will still be with us next year, or indeed developing new product lines to cater for this year's release of the next generation of tablet computers.The continued competition in the tablet computing market hits the online headlines daily, with Mashable.com and Wired.co.uk dedicating entire categories to tablet discussion and news. ComScore, the experts in digital measurement, found Android taking second place as the operating system of choice in Europe, beating Apple's iOS and coming second only to Symbian.