Tablets will be on display everywhere at CES this week. It reminds me of digital photo frames and eReaders last year. Everyone had’em. Not that many were very good.
Here’s a round-up of some of the tablet launches planned in Vegas.
Toshiba
Toshiba took the wraps off its tablet entry before the official start of CES. It’s got a 10.1-inch touch screen, NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor, and will run Android Honeycomb (aka Android 3.0). CNET’s Donald Bell liked his first hands-on experience with the device, though he only got to check out the hardware, not the software. He said it felt more polished than the Galaxy Tab, and more rugged than the iPad. It also sports two cameras, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (no cellular connectivity), an HDMI port, and removable battery.
Motorola
Motorola, meanwhile, has been teasing its entry tablet device for months. We’ll see the official unveiling at a press conference scheduled for tomorrow, but there are a few details we already know. It too will have a 10-inch screen and run Android 3.0. But the rumor is that it will also have a hardware upgrade option to add LTE. World’s first 4G tablet?
Lenovo
Lenovo is launching a slew of products at CES, including the ThinkPad products announced on Monday, and the IdeaPad products announced today. However, in a interactive webcast hosted by the company in December, Lenovo also alluded to a tablet it will be launching at CES. The wording during the webcast made the tablet sound like a product for the business market, but an exec also said there would be a consumer slate version coming too. What will be on display in Vegas still remains to be seen.
Technicolor
Word of a new tablet from Technicolor leaked out through the FCC in December. Since then there’s been further confirmation from the company that it will launch an Android tablet at CES. Assuming it’s the same product we saw from the FCC, the Technicolor TVA200 will have a 7-inch screen, one front facing camera, and a Freescale ARM Cortex A8 CPU running at 800MHz.
Vizio
Vizio, like Toshiba, jumped the gun and announced its Vizio VIA Tablet before the start of CES. It’s got an 8-inch screen, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, one front-facing camera, an HDMI port, and a 1GHz processor. And yes, it runs Android. Engadget is speculating that Honeycomb is in the works.
Other companies with tablets planned include known names like Archos, and lots of lesser brands like eLocity, Coby, and AOC. Tablets, here we come.
Unlike the photo frame arena, most of these will be running variants of Android. But, beyond the Honeycomb build, it’s something of an interface hack with potentially limited access to the market. Wonder if Honeycomb will be demo-ed this week. That’d be big. Of course, we’re probably just a few short months away from the iPad 2. Honestly, I’m most interested to see how HP leverages webOS in the tablet form.
I am interested, but I think I am leaning towards just grabbing a Win 7 laptop. Since everything at home is Windows based, I don’t know how well I could integrate anything else into the network which would still give me remote access to everything.
Honeycomb is mostly a tablet specific GUI layer on top of Gingerbread, and I seriously doubt there are material changes to functionality. So the build we all have of Gingerbread represents what the Android tablets can *do* ( but not what they’ll *look* like ).
Also, not mentioned in this post …the ability to make a phone call, as well as change the battery, with an Android tablet – GASP!
:P
my gawd! look at them all. what scares me the most is most of them render like they are “fly by night” cheap knock offs or rather… it’s almost like, any company that wants to create a tablet, go download the free android OS and slap your logo on it. boom – make some easy cash!
if i may add – i’m interested to see what the 3.0 android will look like, palm/hp and windows version by major name brand companies. anything else just scares me…
Looks like the same crop of tablets that we saw last year, most of which never materialized. I’ll be interested when they’re selling them in US stores. Until then, whatever. Most of them will probably vanish before they ever ship anything. And honestly, if they’re not from a name brand like Toshiba or something, are you really going to buy one? Archos for example has a reputation for service and reliability that is so awful I wouldn’t touch anything they put out, no matter how amazing.