AOC breezes into small tablet market

MANILA, Philippines - When flush with euphoria over domination or victory, one can choose one of two tracks: circumspection or brashness. Companies that are ever on the lookout for opportunities and growth cannot afford the latter. Recklessness can spell all sorts of trouble, and undo the progresses hammered out.

Taiwan-headquartered AOC (which was actually first established in Chicago, Illinois) steadily grew in girth and scope since its inception in 1967 as an exporter of color televisions. Today, one of every monitor in the market bears AOC’s fingerprint. The company operates nine international offices, and its products and support services are in more than 100 countries.

AOC has been in the Philippines for 15 solid years — 12 of those as the leader in display technology. Today, the company corners a hefty 30 percent of the market.

Driven by the warm reception from Filipino technophiles, AOC has chosen the Philippine market as the first in the Asia-Pacific to see its new product line — two sizes of the AOC Breeze tablets. Launched over a year ago in Brazil where an astounding 300,000 units are sold each month alone, the Breeze, says Kan Yeung, regional sales director for MMD Singapore Pte Ltd., marries an inexpensive price tag with best-in-class values.

He insists that, despite the success and size of AOC, they are not like other companies that diversify outside their core competency. “We only do one product,” Yeung says. “We don’t do PCs and notebooks. We only make what we’re good at: the display. We do only monitors and TV.” AOC thus leverages on its expertise in monitor/display technology to present seven- and eight-inch tablets for the Filipinos’ consideration.

But make no mistake about it, AOC’s mother company TPV wants to be taken seriously. It acquired the Philips LCD product line from the Dutch company in 2009, and last year bought its TV business entirely. In China, adds Yeung, TPV owns 10 different brands.

AOC business development manager Jack Salamia shows the secret sauce for the Breeze — TFT  (thin-film transistor) capacitive panels, usually reserved for high-end laptops and devices. With resolution ratings of 1024 x 600 pixels for the seven-inch MW0731+ and 1024 x 768 for the eight-inch MW0831, the tablets deliver HD-quality images. IPS panel technology for the eight-inch “improves the limitation of the normal TL panel, increases speed, viewing angle, and color variation,” he adds.

With the Breeze, users can take photos and record video with the front 0.3-megapixel (three megapixels on the MW0831) camera, enjoy Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, watch videos (and, in the case of the MW0831, even hook them up to an HDMI-ready monitor for 1080P-quality video), navigate the Internet, check e-mail, and make video calls. Salamia says the Breeze can accommodate a variety of audio and video file types. Moreover, the Breeze can also be used as a hotspot.

The two work on the latest Jellybean 4.1 operating system that, Salamia maintains, delivers higher speed, response time, and greater user interface. Unlike some tablets, the Breeze features a separate GPU (graphics processing unit) and CPU (central processing unit). The GPU boasts 400 MHz of speed, while the CPU logs 1.4 GHz. Interestingly, its ARM Cortex A9 duo-core heart out-duels the A6 of Apple’s iPad Mini, continues Salamia.

Both models are bestowed 8GB of internal memory that is expandable to 32GB through a microSD slot. The Breeze tablets also have 1G DDR3 RAM. As for battery life, AOC claims its seven-inch tablet can play 12 hours of audio on a single charge, while the MW0831 can last 25 hours for the same.

Each unit of either model comes with a charger, a leather cover, and an OTG (on the go) cable — which connects the Breeze to a PC via the MicroUSB slot.

“The way we see it, the tablet market is comprised of mainly three sizes — seven inches, eight inches, and 10 inches,” declares Yeung. “For the 10 inches, there’s no way you could compete with Apple, to be honest. Even Samsung cannot.”

So AOC (as driven by its mother company TPV) leverages on its strength in display technology to assert its might in the seven- and eight-inch tablet domain. Yeung maintains that AOC keeps its edge by not looking at the market as “low-end.” Other companies, he says, use bottom-rung performance, single-core CPUs and don’t even have a GPU to speak of. “They are very cheap, but if you want to play games, then you will have problems,” he adds.

“Our GPU, on the other hand, is quad core. We want to give our users a good experience,” Yeung says. “Our specifications are better than some of the Taiwanese brands, yet our price is cheaper. That’s something we want to bring to the market.”

Again, AOC is able to adroitly manage these twin contrasts in value because of its extensive experience and wide girth.

“TPV’s scale is very big, so we have the advantage to buy panels and manufacture in a very effective and efficient way,” he concludes. Indeed, in a very real way, things in the small tablet market are getting bigger.

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The MW0731+ is priced at P5,999; the MW0831 goes for P8,999. The AOC Breeze tablets are available at all authorized retailers nationwide, and are distributed by EA Global Supply Chain Solutions. Breeze products will be supported in the 29 AOC service centers in the country.