If 2010 was the year of the tablets, 2011 might turn out to be the year, the entire tablets market evolved from its early nascent stage that we saw in 2010. At last year’s CES, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and HP were particularly bullish about the tablets space. In fact Ballmer’s keynote was particularly focused on the tablets. Back then HP’s Slate, a Windows 7 based tablet was the cynosure of all eyes. However, it wasn’t until October 2010 that HP finally launched the Slate. If that wasn’t all, it had metamorphosed in to an enterprise focused device and not the funky consumer centric one everyone had seen it as at the CES.
By then, Apple’s iPad had long taken the crown of the king of the tablets space. Since its launch in April, the iPad has went on to become the most popular and the most sold tablet ever. It was only by late 2010 that it received some competition in the form of a number of Android based tablets. RIM also jumped in to the picture with its Playbook.
When the HP Slate turned out to be an enterprise device everyone knew the reason for that. HP had in 2010 took over the reins of Palm Inc – the maker of the once popular Palm smartphones. Along with a bunch of Palm devices, HP now had access to the highly capable WebOS from Palm. It was commonsense that the WebOS would be much more suitable to a Tablet than a ‘made for PC OS’ like Windows 7. While there were rumors about HP tweaking the Palm WebOS to make it suitable for tablets, no one knew if that news was true. However, according to a new report from Fox News, we might actually see not one – but three new Palm based tablets at the CES 2011.
All the three Palm tablets would come with slightly different hardware and boast of features like and HDMI out, USB 3.0 support and of course, front and rear cameras. What we still do not know are the screen sizes. As expected, it would run a tweaked version of WebOS and cold be launched by March. There is a fourth version as well according to the report. However, that would not be showcased at the event.
By then, Apple is also reportedly bringing the Pad 2 which many expect to be a significant upgrade over the current one. It would be amusing to see how the tablet space pans out then because by then we would not only be seeing a bunch of new tablets from various manufacturers but also the arrival of the updated, made for tablet Android OS – the Honeycomb.
[Via Fox News]
