When the stuff comes alive on you, you had better be in shape to handle it
- Ernest Hemmingway
Apple today announced that iPad sales have topped two million in less than 60 days since its launch on April 3. The company sold about a million iPads in the first month and began shipping iPads in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend.
Apple won’t have the world to itself. Computex, the world’s second-biggest IT trade fair, does not officially start until Tuesday but it has already started with a bang.
Jen-hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, predicted that within five years “tablets will be the world’s biggest computing category”. Hardware makers will unite behind Google’s Android for tablet computers, according to Nvidia’s CEO. The company’s Arm-based Tegra 2 is designed for tablets.
ASUS, MSI, ARM, NVIDIA and other companies are announcing as many as 36 different tablets which are expected to be arriving this summer.
Some of those include:
- MSI unveiled Wind Pad Windows and Android tablets. Both feature 10 inch touchscreen displays, but under the hood they’re very different. MSI Wind Pad 100 packs a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor and runs Windows 7 Ultimate while the Wind Pad 110 uses a NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset and runs Android 2.1.
- Asus introduced the The Eee Tablet and Eee Pad. The Eee Tablet is an e-reader and note taker,with a backlight-less TFT-LCD offering 64-levels of grey and will cost between $199 and $299 when it launches in September. Eee Pad, in 10 and 12-inch models, will run Windows on Intel’s Core 2 Duo CULV processors with a reputed 10-hour battery life and will cost $399 to $499. Don’t hold your breath. The Eee Pad won’t be out until the first quarter of 2011.
- ARM showcased a boat load of ARM-based devices and announced the next generation “Eagle” processor above the current Cortex-A9 platform, but it isn’t expected to ship until 2012.
- NVIDIA announced a trio of new “3D PCs” — using 3D active-shutter glasses, a 120Hz 3D-capable display and their graphics processor. NVIDIA’s automatic graphics switching Optimus technology will be used by at least four more major manufacturers by the end of the summer.
- The ExoPC Slate has a 11.6-inch screen with a custom software layer on top of Windows 7, an 1.6GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 2GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD. The tablet should be ready by early September for $599.
- X2 is talking up five variants of their iTablet. According to JKK Mobile, three are Intel devices (including the iTablet Lite, which features a 10.1-inch display and 1.6GHz Atom CPU and both the T23A and T23X tablets with Core 2 Duo 743 1.30GHz CPU and 12.1-inch display). A pair of 10.1-inch tablets include an Nvidia Tegra 2 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 512MB NAND Flash storage, and one running the Freescale 800MHz CPU. The latter two with either Windows CE or Android.
- Dell’s Streak tablet is due June 4. It’s a phone and a 5″ Android tablet with a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 5MP camera, 2 GB internal storage, wi-fi and bluetooth. It will also have a camera on the front for you to video chat.
Tablets have the potential to disrupt much of the traditional PC market. They may eat into sales of laptops, currently the industry’s biggest profit maker, and threaten the dominance of Microsoft.
Newspapers and magazines may be transformed as publishers go on-line, either through tablet apps (like Apple’s) or through mobile web sites (like Google’s).
My Grandfather, Roscoe Sheller, sold Model T’s at the beginning of the 20th century (The History Channel: Boom). The 21st Century promises to be just as transformative.
The publishing and television business may be never be the same. Content is coming alive, standing up on it’s own two feet and going mobile, social and ala carte.
