Steve Jobs might be incommunicado at present, but COO Tim Cook – currently taking charge of day to day duties – is doing his best to pick up where Jobs left off.

As a result, Cook was fairly scathing when probed about iPad's rivals, falling back on the kind of comments we might have expected his superior to voice.

Weighty Windows

"There's not much out there as you know," Cook said of the current tablets on the market.

"There are two kinds of groups today - the ones using a Windows-based operating system. They're big, heavy and expensive. Weak battery life. Need keyboard or stylus. From our point of view, customers aren't interested in that."

Cook, of course, didn't hold back when it came to offering comment on arguably the biggest challenger to Apple's current tablet dominance - cemented by sales of 14.8 million iPads in 2010.

Of Android, Cook pitched Samsung's Galaxy Tab as something of an awkward beast.

"The variety shipping today, the OS wasn't designed for a tablet – but Google said this," he added.

"So you wind up having the size of a tablet that's less than reasonable. Or one that's not even a real tablet experience.

"It's a 'scaled-up smartphone' – that's a bizarre product in our view. If you do a side-by-side with an iPad, some enormous percentage are going to pick the iPad. We have no concern there."

A new war

Cook's comments are by no means surprising, with Google itself pitching Android 3.0 – known as Honeycomb – as the first iteration of the platform designed with tablets in mind.

As such, Apple may find its leadership challenged a little more forcefully when 3.0 devices, such as Motorola's Xoom, hit the shelves, though chasing down its current 87.4 percent market share will be some task.

[source: TechCrunch]