Less than a year of their launch, Sharp is discontinuing the production of two of its three Galapagos tablets.
The tablets facing the axe are the 5.5-inch and 10.8-inch Galapagos tablets.
Both the tablets will be discontinued as of Sept. 30, 2011, the company announced in a press release.
The tablets were being sold only in Japan.
A bit about the two axed Galapagos tablets:
Both the tablets were launched in Japan in December 2010, with the belief to sell a million of the devices. The company pitched the tablets as competitors to Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle.
But the tablets were never able to pose even a distant threat to either Apple ipad or Amazon kindle. The fact that the Galapagos devices can neither fully fit into a tablet PC bracket nor in a typical e-reader, made them fall.
Made to exist as an E-reader, the Galapagos devices, with a bright, color LCD screen and Android operating system appeared closer to an iPad than a Kindle; but when the user finds that the tablets neither allowed him/her to download or install software of choice (Sharp's e-book reader software only was allowed) nor the device had any multimedia player; then he/she can’t call the Galapagos e-reader a tablet PC either.
The bright, color LCD screen robbed the Galapagos of its humble e-reader virtues as well.The device was also limited to Sharp's e-book reader software; making for a limited appeal to the buyer.
In addition, the 10.8-inch model was priced between Apple's 16GB and 32GB Wi-Fi versions, and hence was much expensive than Amazon's 9.7-inch Kindle Reader. The pricing for the 5.5-inch model was even more un-understandable. The tablet was expensive than all models of the Kindle and Sony Reader selling in Japan at the time.
NOTE: Sharp will keep selling the 7-inch Galapagos model, running on Android 3.2 or Honeycomb, and enabling users to watch HD movies and play 3D games.
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