NVIDIA CEO Says Favorable Things About A Platform It Supports

Nvidia makes some pretty sweet processors. One is even named after Superman! They’re cool. Sometimes those chips end up in Android tablets. On much rarer occasions, they end up in Apple tablets. Those occasions are so rare, in fact, that I made that up. It never happens. But it would sure make Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s prediction that Android tablets will overtake iPad shipments in about two and a half years a little less self-promoting, wouldn’t it?

Ahhhh, but come on! Let’s give the guy a break. He’s probably right! Right? Right. See, it’s what happened in the smartphone market. As you know, smartphones are generally sold on contracts, with heavy subsidies, and are replaced about as frequently as contracts are renewed in a lot of cases. Whereas tablets are….umm….well. Well, you use money to buy them! That’s one similarity.

Still. The fact that the Android platform is on a wide variety of devices from various manufacturers is likely going to be one huge advantage that Android has over the iPad. The wide variety of form factors has helped the Android market boom. And just take a look at two of the leading Android tablets right now: the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (both running Nvidia chips, naturally). And they offer a wide variety of hardware options: one of them is a large, roughly 10″ slab with a touchscreen and some ports while the other is…umm…..err. That is….

Well, look. The point is that Android won the numbers game in the smartphone space, and it will probably take only just as long for them to win in the tablet space. Probably. I guess.

Or maybe the technology industry is vast and complex, the tablet market hasn’t even really been defined yet, and there’s still plenty of room for experimentation, innovation, and discovery before anything is settled and life is less straightforward than projections on a chart. I guess.

It’s more fun this way, though, right?

[via CrunchGear]