subject: It's Tablet Time At 2011 Ces [print this page] This year the Consumer Electronics Show, in early January, is shaping up to be the year of the tablet. Yet the most (some would say only) successful tablet to date is the one that wont be at CES. Apple sold 7.5 million iPads in the first six months and no doubt millions more this holiday season. Its shadow will hangs over the show, forcing a wide range of companieschipmakers, computer hardware and consumer electronics companies, software developers and wireless carriersto announce plans for tablets. Heres what Im expecting to see.
An Android assaultGoogles mobile operating system has been a hit on smartphones, but even the most recent version, Android 2.3 or Gingerbread, available on the Nexus S, isnt really designed for tablets. As the first to market, Samsung has had some success with the Galaxy Tab, which runs Android 2.2 (aka Froyo), but most reviews have noted that the 7-inch slate feels more like an over-sized smartphone than a true tablet. The first version that will be designed for tablets, known as Honeycomb, will be out sometime in 2011. At the D: Dive Into Mobile conference earlier this month, Googles Andy Rubin surprised the world by demonstrating a Motorola tablet powered by an Nvidia dual-core processor and running Honeycomb. The Android Market seems to have good momentum, but it remains to be seen how Google will distinguish between smartphone and tablet apps once Honeycomb is launched.
Apple designs its own A4 chip for the iPhone and iPad (widely assumed to be manufactured by Samsung), but Android is more of a free for all. All of the same companies designing ARM-based chips for Android smartphonesSamsung, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Freescale, Marvell and othersoffer processors for tablets. The Galaxy Tab uses a Samsung processor with a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 core. Other companies such as Broadcom, Nvidia and MediaTek are trying to push their way in as well. There are rumors that Nvidias Tegra 2, an SoC with 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor and powerful graphics, is the reference platform used by Honeycombs developers. In addition to Motorolas tablet, Tegra has been linked to future tablets from Acer, Asus, MSI, Samsung and Toshiba. Intel also supports Android, and the company said Asus, Cisco and Lenovo are among the companies building Atom-based Android tablets.
