Apple's Cook Calls CES Tablets 'Vapor'

Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook stepped in for Apple chief executive Steve Jobs on the company's analyst call on Tuesday - and provided his own tablet argument, as well, calling scaled-up smartphones "bizarre".

Jobs, who famously slammed RIM and Google last October, took some medial leave this week, leading to talk talk of a succession plan. That didn't stop Apple, however, which reported another record quarter led by record sales of Macs, iPads, and iPhones.

Cook, however, was asked about the iPad's success in relation to the dozens of new tablets that were shown off at the recent CES show in Las Vegas. IDC reported earlier Tuesday that the iPad boosted the tablet market by 45 percent in the third quarter.

"If you look at what's shipping today, there's not much out there as you know," Cook said. "Generally speaking, there's two kinds of groups today at best on the market today - ones using a Windows tablet PC, are fairly big and heavy and expensive. They have weak battery life, they require a stylus, and from our point of view and what's we've seen customers are just not interested in them.

"Then you have the Android tablet, and the variety are out shipping today, the operating system really wasn't designed for a tablet," Cook added. "Google has said this, so this is not just an Apple view by any means. And so you wind up having a size of a tablet that is less than what we believe is reasonable, or one that we provide what we feel is the real tablet experience. So basically, you end up with a sort of scaled-up smartphone, which is a bizarre product, in our view. Then you've got a third group – those are the two that are shipping today – and frankly speaking its hard for me, to understand if somebody does a side-by-side with an iPad, and some enormous percentage of people are going to select an iPad there – those are not [products] that we have any concern on."

Cook didn't mention any competing products by name, although some have classified the Dell Streak as a scaled-up smartphone.

"The next generation of Android tablets, which is what you discussed primarily at CES - there's nothing shipping yet, and so I don't know," Cook concluded. "Generally they lack performance specs, they lack prices, they lack timing, and so today they're vapor. We'll assess them as they come out, wherever, but we're not sitting still, and we have a huge first mover advantage. And we have an incredible user experience from iTunes to the App Store and an enormous number of apps and a hugee ecosystem. So we're very very confident…"

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