No such thing as bad publicity
As the dust settles following Apple's latest high-profile launch, we feel that, bizarrely, the hype around the iPad may have been of more benefit to Apple's competitors.
There probably isn't another company on Earth that can generate as much publicity for a product launch as Apple. As a consequence, even people living in caves or on desert islands are now familiar with the concept of a tablet. They, like us, might not get what all the fuss is about, but they'll certainly know about it.
One thing they probably will understand is that it's a new type of smart device, residing somewhere between mobile phones and PCs in terms of both size and functionality. It's relatively affordable, intuitive, sexy and further blurs the line between a consumer electronic device and a PC.
For this reason, we think Apple has done a big favour to the whole technology industry. Yes, it's having to deal with a fair bit of ridicule for delivering something less amazing than most people had convinced themselves it would, but that just raises the profile of the product yet further.
Now regular consumers, not just tech enthusiasts, are mulling over what kind of smart devices - over and above their phones and their PCs - they might want to acquire.
This is all especially good news for the makers of the kinds of low-power chips (SoCs) required to run these devices. Essentially this boils down to Intel and the ARM ecosystem, one coming from a position of PC dominance, the other from even greater dominance of the mobile phone sector.
Here at HEXUS.channel we've brought you a lot of news from not just Intel and ARM, but SoC makers like Qualcomm and NVIDIA. Not including new entrant Apple, there's one other company that is just as influential as any of these in the SoC sector - Texas Instruments (TI).
