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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific
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The Apple Tablet - iWonder!
January 25, 2010
The computing industry and no doubt a few other industries, such as publishing, are holding their collective breath for the announcement of the impending release of the Apple iSlate / iPad / iTablet this coming Thursday morning (8am Australian East Coast time UTC/GMT +11 hours)
There is already substantial hype about what the product specs and name will be and competitors are already scrambling to announce devices similar to what they expect to see in Thursday’s announcement, not dissimilar to what was experienced at the time of the iPhone announcement on January 9, 2007.
Pre-announcement there is more interest around the upcoming Apple tablet device than there was at the time of the iPhone announcement. The leading three search terms relating to the upcoming announcement, (“apple tablet”, “apple islate”, and “islate apple”) accounted for 0.0044% of all searches in week ending 23 January 2010, over seven times greater than the share of searches generated by the top three search terms relating to the iPhone (“iphone”, “apple phone” and “apple iphone”) in week ending 6 January 2007.
So strong is the interest in the announcement, “apple tablet” is the most searched for product related search variation of Apple in week ending 23 January 2010, with almost twice the search volume of Apple iPhone.
In the top 1,000 search terms containing “Apple” there were 30 tablet device related search variations, and only one related term in the top 1,000 search terms contain “Mac”. Consumers clearly understand the product distinctions between the line up of desktop and laptop computers carrying the Mac branding or designation and the portable devices bearing the “I” prefix.
With no prior announcement of the name, the rumour mill has run wild with all sorts of guesses, the most popular being the itablet, islate and ipad. The following chart indicates the search volume around the top related search terms in the week ending 23 January 2010.
While these don’t indicate Apple’s preferred name, it does indicate the names that have grabbed the most attention, most likely driven by influential blogs and news and media websites.
The main beneficiaries of the leading term ‘apple tablet’ in the past week (week ending 23 January 2010) has been a mix of Technical / Computer, Blogs and News and Media websites, with the most obvious exclusion the local traditional newspaper websites.
Apple has been tight-lipped as usual about the new product release and the interest is building. Whether this interest will translate to another successful product launch and transform another industry vertical as the iPod did with Music will have to wait until closer to launch of the yet unnamed product. iWonder what it will be?
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Posted by Alan Long at 04:50 PM
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In Categories Apple | Entertainment | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds
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Comments
Nice analytics - makes for interesting reading. I did similar research a few days ago on the potential name of the new tablet, based on online media coverage - if you like, you can check it out here http://olearyanalytics.com/ As always, the bookmakers got it right...
Posted by Stephen O'Leary | January 28, 2010 11:31 AM
Hi Alan,
Interesting article, do you have any follow up on this since the iPad was launched?
Be interesting to know what your reports display now?
Posted by Lyndon Maher | February 15, 2010 11:08 AM
I think it will be called i pronounced, eye.
Second guess, EYE or "the EYE"
Hurry up Jan 27th..!!
Posted by Swen | January 26, 2010 07:56 AM