LAS VEGAS: Big Tablets and small Tablets, white ones and black ones. Cheap ones and expensive ones. Brand names famous and obscure at the starting line of a race where the iPad is already a speeding dot near the horizon.
It was impossible to walk the floor at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) without stumbling across a multitude of keyboard-less touchscreen computers expected to hit the market in the coming months.
With Apple estimated to have sold more than 13 million iPads last year alone, the competition is clearly for second place, but even that prize is worth pursuing.
Technology research firm Gartner Inc expects that 55 million Tablet computers will be shipped this year, most of them still iPads, but there will be room for rivals to vie for sales of the remaining 10 million to 15 million devices.
A bevy of consumer electronics makers, including major names such as Motorola Mobility Inc, Toshiba Corp and Dell Inc, showed off their Tablets at the show, betting that this will be the year the gadgets finally take off.
Companies tried for years to popularize tablets, but the frenzy began only with the release of the iPad in April. Now companies whose names don't include the word "Apple" are doing everything they can to differentiate themselves from the Tablet front-runner.
They're adding bells and whistles the iPad doesn't yet have - such as front and back cameras for video chatting and picture taking and the ability to work over next-generation 4G data networks - in hopes of taking on the iPad, or at least carving out a niche.
Motorola's Xoom sports a screen that measures 10.1in diagonally - slightly larger than the iPad's - and dual cameras for video chatting and taking high-definition videos. It will also include the upcoming Honeycomb version of Google Inc's Android software.
Honeycomb has been designed for the larger touchscreens on Tablets; current versions of Android, used in many of the Tablets at CES, are meant more for the smaller touchscreens on smartphones.
For example, Gmail on a Honeycomb tablet shows a list of e-mail messages in one column and the body of the one you're reading in a second column. On a current Android phone, you'd only see one column at a time.
Motorola is confident that its offering is more full-featured than the iPad. "A lot of people have been waiting for the definitive Tablet," said Paul Nicholson, Motorola's marketing director. "This is the definitive Tablet."
The Tablet will start selling in March for an as-yet-unknown price.
"Today we see a lot of Tablet usage in the home. Perhaps tying it to a faster network can ... really expand the on-the-go use case for these products," said Ross Rubin, an analyst for the NPD Group market research firm.
No matter how well any of the new contenders are received, though, analysts expect Apple to dominate in the Tablet market for at least two years. With Apple's habit of annually refreshing its products, chances are the iPad will gain new features early this year that could launch it even further ahead of the competition.
And the company has something no one else has been able to match: Mind share. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said consumers are buying the iPad because they see their friends and colleagues with it, not because of its specific features.
"Just because Android Tablets may have more features doesn't guarantee they will sell," Rotman Epps said.
But if the market opened up by Apple's other mobile triumph, the iPhone, is any indication, they will. Since its 2007 debut the iPhone has been immensely popular, but it also sparked increased consumer demand for other smartphones - eventually including those running Android.
For AsusTek Computer Inc, the most important focus right now appears to be hardware and software diversification. The Taiwanese computer maker unveiled a number of Tablets at the show, including the Eee Pad Transformer, which is a laptop that splits in two to function as a Tablet, and the Eee Pad Slider, a Tablet with a keyboard that slides out of its left side.
The Transformer is set to begin selling in April for US$399 to US$699, depending on its configuration. And the Slider is set to be sold starting in May for US$499 to US$799.
This puts its cheapest Transformer US$100 below the most inexpensive iPad, which sells for US$499 to US$829, depending on its configuration.
Several other companies unveiled even cheaper Tablets at the show, which could pique consumer interest, though lower prices could come with less-vivid screens and older software.
Richard Shim, a DisplaySearch analyst, said Asus' tactics point to a wider trend in Tablets: The market is branching out extremely quickly in an effort to appeal to a wider range of consumers.
This extends to operating software, too: Some Tablets shown ran Microsoft Corp's PC software, Windows 7. Research In Motion (RIM) Ltd, maker of BlackBerry phones, unveiled its forthcoming PlayBook Tablet, which is geared toward business users and runs software built by QNX Software Systems, which RIM took over last year.
RIM plans to start selling a WiFi version of the PlayBook early this year.
Android was clearly the software of choice, and Honeycomb in particular. Rotman Epps sees this as the software for the first "real" Android Tablet, despite the arrival of several non-Honeycomb Android Tablets such as Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab last year. She thinks Honeycomb will help new
Tablets make their mark.
That's hard to judge now, however: Honeycomb hasn't been released yet. Many Tablets at the show that will be released with that software were not showing off live versions of it at the event.
Several analysts said software - and the apps developed for it - are what will set winning Tablets apart from the pack, but for now it's too soon to tell how compelling they will be.
"At the end of the day, that's what's going to sell the device," Shim said. - AP
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