Still can’t make up your mind about the spanking new iPad 2? We’ve gone through some initial reviews already a spell ago.

Now here’s more…

Needham’s Charlie Wolf: iPad 2 immediately obsoletes a flood of media tablets that are finally beginning to appear a year after the iPad’s introduction. Competitive tablets can emulate the hardware features of the iPad. But none can or probably never will match its software. Nor can they match its price.

Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner: This is a sad day for the crowd of competitors still struggling to home in on the first iPad’s price and performance. We continue to see Apple grabbing 75-85% of the tablet market in 2011.

Citigroup’s Richard Gardner: In addition to the hardware, the iPad will be advantaged due to 1) an aggressive entry price of $499, which will be difficult to match given Apple’s cost advantage, 2) its ability to attract developers (65,000 tablet-specific apps on iOS, vs. an insignificant number on other platforms), 3) Apple’s impressive installed base of more than 200M accounts linked to credit cards, and 4) a seamless and intuitive user experience, which remains unmatched.

It’s one thing for Apple fan boys, droolers, lurkers, and trollers to hype the iPad or bash Android, but it’s a complete other to read analysts detailing projections, facts, trends, company histories, retail store effects, market buying behavior, app ecosystem dynamics, developer preferences, and the like, to make their case.

The full analysts’ weigh-ins are here.

Irwin Allen Rivera

Irwin likes his wife's cooking so much he's now almost twice the man he used to be. He was Managing Editor of "Sites and Symbols 2," a photo-historical coffee table book on the buildings in U.P. Diliman, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and where his on-again-off-again M.A. in Creative Writing drags on. He wrote for the U.P. Diliman Information Office for six years before succumbing to the weight gain-inducing ways of night shift web content writing - first in Ortigas, then in Makati. His sudden fiction, "Notwithstanding Pigs," saw publication light first as a Friendster testimonial, then on the pages of "Philippine Graphic" (Feb 2006), and lastly as part of a Vince Groyon-edited "Very Short Stories for Harried Readers" (Milflores: 2007).

email: swirlingovercoffee@gmail.com