Can Customised Tablets Help Overcome Slowing Sales?

After the huge growth of tablet sales in 2012-13, the tablet market in India went through a slowdown for a number of reasons but at least part of the problem isn't just specific to India. Globally there is still a fair amount of confusion on what tablets are meant to be used for and what the ideal market is, and the growth is just 6.5 percent year on year, according to IDC analysts.

As a result, there have been quite a few moves to build a market for tablets in fields like education, healthcare and the hospitality industry, and the iPad has featured prominently in plenty of these initiatives. More recently, Apple tied up with IBM for help in selling iPhone and iPad to businesses. While the popularity of iPhone remains unquestioned, the iPad has been seen to be in a slump, with a survey by Strategy Analytics showing that the marketshare of iPad has gone down to 28.4 percent in the first quarter of 2014, down from 40.3 percent a year ago.

Of course, there are a number of different reasons at play for the drop in tablet sales in India.

Sandeep Arora, Director Marketing, Intel South Asia, says, "For one thing, after the tablets came to India, there was a rush to make the cheapest devices," says Arora. "And this eroded the trust in the market. You couldn't depend on the quality of the products."

At the same time new regulations that were meant to prevent low quality products from flooding the market also brought in their own set of delays. The Bureau of Indian Standards requires all tablets (along with several other electronics products) to be certified and given the large number of products and the slow certification process delays in launching products became unavoidable. These two facts together took a pretty heavy toll on the tablet market but Arora says that the scenario has been improving on both fronts.

(Also see: How a Little-Known Rule Hurt Tablet Sales in India; but Is a Turnaround Near?)

The solution for the tablet problem - at least for large scale enterprise sales - could lie in "verticalisation", according to Arora. What he means by this is that devices need to be tailor-made to meet the physical and software requirements of their specific use cases.

For example, an Indian startup is planning to launch customised tablets for women, children, gamers and the elderly. Pinig Tech plans to offer these customised tablets at prices less than Rs. 5,000, going up to Rs. 12,800 depending on the user's requirements.

But given that companies and individuals can simply pick up general purpose tablets - whether iPads or other devices - and install apps specific to their requirement, why is there a need for specialised devices?

"Category specific devices can come with a lot of customisation that makes them suitable for the task at hand," says Arora, giving the example of the Eddy, a kid friendly tablet released by a company called Metis.

The first Eddy was launched nearly a year ago in January. A new version of the device has been launched last week in partnership with Intel.

"We did a lot of R&D work together with Metis, to determine the requirements, what needed to be unique about the device," says Arora. The result is an Android tablet that is running a highly customised version of the OS. The tablet comes with books, games, videos and other educational materials that parents can download. Parents can even control when and how long their children can use the device.

But it's not just the software that has been customised to meet the needs of its users. Bharat Gulia, co-founder of Metis, showed us some of the physical design features. This included removable rubberised covers that are available in a range of bright colours, and a strengthened glass screen that he says should survive even if your child drops the tablet.

"With an iPad or another tablet, first of all, you're worried about giving your expensive tablet to your child," says Gulia. "What if the kid drops it, what if something damages your screen? So from that perspective, we wanted to make something that was properly rugged. That's why we couldn't just do this as an app you can load on any smartphone or tablet."

The Eddy is available for Rs. 9,999 at retail but Gulia is hopeful that it will see adoption by schools as well. For Intel the goal is to focus on the various designs and customisations that can make tablets and computers useful in niche situations.

"There is a lot of scope for customisation in BFSI, and on the shop floor," says Arora. "And the hospitality industry is another area where you might see a lot of benefit from customisations. Of course the consumer tablets are not going away, those are going to be successful as well, but at the same time, customised offerings are also going to expand and become popular."