(Disclaimer: I own a whole stack of Apple kit, including an iPad, and some AAPL). I've not played with a Xoom, but it keeps striking me that all of the people

(Disclaimer: I own a whole stack of Apple kit, including an iPad, and some AAPL). I've not played with a Xoom, but it keeps striking me that all of the people launching Android tablets are totally the wrong people to be doing it. Apple has (at least) the following things going for it: 1) It gets great deals on components and manufacturing 2) It maintains very consistent retail pricing 3) It does a lot of retail itself 4) It gets 30% off the top of all app purchases on the device 5) It gets ?% off the top of all music/movie purchases on the device Points 1-3 are good for initial profit margins. It means they're making decent money on every iPad sold. Points 4 and 5 are good for ARPU (average revenue per user) - it means you're continuing to make money from every device sale, long into the future. Now look at the Xoom or the Galaxy Tab or any other android tablet currently available or announced and think very hard about which of the above points apply. I think you'd struggle to apply anything other than point 1 and even that probably only applies to Samsung. Most of the vendors do small manufacturing runs, sell them wholesale to retailers and get no money from end users until it's time for new hardware. The only exception to this I can think of would be revenue sharing deals from the mobile networks on the 3G models. I don't know what kind of deals these would be, but my guess is that the networks would demand pretty cheap unit prices on the hardware. So who could do better? The obvious answer is Amazon, they could at least get points 3, 4 and 5 (and 3 strongly suggests they'd also get point 2) and what are they doing? Running an Android app store right now. If they can make a good tablet (and the Kindle hardware suggests they should be able to), they could really make a splash with it, and that would help them improve on point 1. Sony might be able to, in that they could arrange point 5 and potentially 1 and 2, but my general view on Sony's ability to execute in the 'digital lifestyle' arena is very very negative ;) Alternatively perhaps Samsung's desire to copy Apple's hardware will translate into a desire to copy their services. If they could get deals on content then they could get points 4 and 5 and differentiate themselves from the Android crowd. That's my take on part of the tablet world. I also think Android badly needs some really slick tablet apps - on a par with iMovie and GarageBand, both of which are stunningly good.