Apple's COO Criticizes iPad Competition, Calling All Rivals 'Vapor'

The tablet wars buzz continues on this week as Apple’s (News - Alert) COO slammed iPad competitors, calling them “heavy,” “bizarre,” and, apparently “vaporous.” Tim Cook, the CEO stand-in for Steve Jobs, was pretty harsh at the company’s earnings call, citing that iPad sales are up 75 percent from its previous quarter, thus giving him fuel for his criticisms.

Despite the competition from companies like Toshiba (News - Alert), Asus, and now Lenovo, Cook explained that Apple’s view on the tablet market completely falls in their favor.

“If you look at what's shipping today, there's not much out there, as you know. And generally speaking, there are two groups today that are at least on the market today. The ones that are using a Windows-based operating system are generally fairly big and heavy and expensive. They have very weak battery life. They require a keyboard or a stylus as the input device. And from our point of view, and what we've seen, customers frankly, just are not interested in them,” said Cook on the earnings call.

Google’s (News - Alert) very own Android OS for tablet devices, Honeycomb, comes with “better app switching, browser tabs, video chat, dynamic app shortcuts and new versions of Google's Android (News - Alert) applications that take advantage of the bigger screen,” as I recently reported on TechZone360.

However, Cook doesn’t feel the OS was designed for the tablet market, and states that this is not the view of Apple, but of Google.

“The next-generation Android tablets, which are primarily what you mentioned in terms of the CES (News - Alert), there's nothing shipping yet, and so I don't know. Generally, they lack performance specs. They lack prices. They lack timing. And so today, they're vapor,” Cook continued.

Apple’s sturdy sales of their iPad helped deliver the TKO results of their successful quarter. It’s no wonder that market intelligence projects double the consumer tablet sales from 10.3 units to 24.1 million units, citing iPad as the leader of the pack. The iPad is expected to lead through 2012.

“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 huge ecosystem. And so we're very, very confident with entering into a fight with anyone,” concluded Cook on the matter.

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