If the spate of announcements on Ultrabook laptops at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is anything to go by, tablet makers have a challenge on hand.

Acer launched the thinnest Ultrabook ever, Lenovo caught the buzz with its IdeaPad Yoga and others, including Dell and Hewlett Packard, are lining up as many as 75 Ultrabook models this year. In India, while tablets are expected to show good growth in 2012, notebooks and Ultrabooks are expected to hold their own, according to industry experts. That's because of the Ultrabooks' ability to create content and also because PC penetration is low in India.

Vendor expectations indicate this. Mr Alok Bharadwaj, President, MAIT, said, “In India, industry expects to sell around 45 lakh laptops and 3 lakh tablets in the current financial year. While laptops will witness around 15 per cent growth, tablets will grow at 100 per cent being a new category.”

While tablets are showing a lot of promise, Mr S. Rajendran, Chief Marketing Officer, Acer India, said that content creators will not find them useful. “Ultrabooks are designed to give people the power to create and share content, whereas tablets are lifestyle devices primarily meant only for content consumption.” He said that both would coexist.

Features

Many Ultrabook manufacturers usually talk about the fact that the device can be used for creating content because of the speed of the processor and the presence of a keyboard, but tablets have an advantage – weight. The iPad2 weighs around 600 gm, while one of the lightest Ultrabooks, the Asus Zenbook UX21, weighs 1.10 kg, which is almost twice as much. But while the iPad is limited to a maximum storage of 64 GB, the Asus Zenbook UX21 can accommodate a base capacity of 128 GB SSD and the presence of a keyboard and USB could make it more appealing to mainstream users.

But many in India may only be able to afford one or the other in any given year, and this could hurt the refresh cycle –laptop users who want to upgrade to a higher-end laptop may decide to stick to the current laptop and instead buy a tablet.

Conceding the possibility of this, Mr S. Ramaprasad, Country Business Manager-MNC Accounts, Intel South Asia, said, “We are fighting for the share of wallet of the customer. But there are first time buyers and repeat buyers and the tablet is a secondary device for a repeat buyer. In India, around 100 million households can afford a PC, but only 20 million have them.” Regarding the rest, he said that even if you could penetrate a few, it would be a huge add-on.

Low PC penetration

The low PC penetration may be the reason why tablets may lose to notebooks — the 20 million who have a PC may look at a tablet, but not the 80 million who don't because they will first want to buy a PC.

Mr Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, said, “In a country where PC penetration is lower than Vietnam, you can't expect people to buy both the devices.”

Refuting the theory that the growth of tablets would hurt the refresh cycle for laptops, he said, “If you have heavy payloads, you can't do them on a tablet. People who can afford an Ultrabook will replace notebooks with Ultrabooks. An Ultrabook can replace a notebook or a tablet, but a tablet cannot replace an Ultrabook or a notebook.”

People who believe in tablets have a lot of faith in them. Mr Sudhir Hasija, Chairman, Karbonn Mobiles, which is launching a tablet in a couple of months, said, “Tablet is definitely the future. Growth will be fast in the Indian market.”

> balaji.n@thehindu.co.in

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