Tablet Wars — The New Lineup of Mobile Tablets

January 19, 2011
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WRITTEN BY
January 19, 2011

Eric Wise

In my pre­vi­ous Blog, we dis­cussed how back in the ear­ly 1990s, Apple released the New­ton Mes­sage Pad in a dark time when the oust­ed Steve Jobs was not guid­ing the Apple fran­chise. With almost twen­ty years of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions since the release of the New­ton, it now seems appar­ent to all that Apple got it right with the iPad. The nat­ur­al exten­sion of the super suc­cess­ful iPhone helped bust open sales of the iPad beyond ear­ly pro­jec­tions. Accord­ing to finan­cial ana­lysts at Bern­stein Research, Apple’s iPad is the most quick­ly adopt­ed non-phone elec­tron­ic device ever — beat­ing out adop­tion rates of the less mag­i­cal DVD player.
Can Apple main­tain its lead and edge in this space? After CES this year, it has become very appar­ent that the tablet mar­ket­place will see dozens of new com­peti­tors. Here is a break­down of what is com­ing down the pike, and more inter­est­ing­ly, what these tablets are going to run on. From a devel­op­er’s per­spec­tive, this real­ly spreads out the field, since we are often chal­lenged to dupli­cate an appli­ca­tion across mul­ti­ple OS’s. Here is what we have our radar pinned on in the near future…
Motoro­la Xoom – Android Hon­ey­comb OS
Motoro­la Xoom leads the way after CES (it won Best of Show) and will be run­ning on the high­ly antic­i­pat­ed Android Hon­ey­comb OS (designed for tablets), which it is the first to offer exclu­sive­ly. The devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty has high hopes for this OS and what it could mean for future appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment. The device itself is loaded with a 1GHz dual-core proces­sor, a 10.1 inch widescreen HD dis­play, and both front- and back-fac­ing cam­eras, all in a pack­age that is rough­ly the same size as the iPad. Amaz­ing­ly, it sup­ports 1080p HD video and HDMI out­put, and is 4G-com­pat­i­ble. It will have Adobe Flash Play­er 10.1 sup­port and fea­ture a built-in gyro­scope, barom­e­ter, eCom­pass, accelerom­e­ter and adap­tive light­ing sensors.
RIM ‘s Black­ber­ry Play­book – QNX OS
RIM has had the specs for the Black­Ber­ry Play­Book avail­able to the gen­er­al pub­lic on the Black­Ber­ry web­site for a while now,  as we dis­cussed in my last blog entry.  How­ev­er, they did recent­ly announce at CES that the Play­Book will be a 4G device.  The Play­Book will run on the Black­Ber­ry Tablet OS, which uses QNX and sup­ports mul­ti-task­ing. Devel­op­ing for the numer­ous BB devices as well as old­er OS’s has been a major chal­lenge for ISBX, but we have met and over­come this chal­lenge.  We are excit­ed to hear about these improve­ments and will be build­ing appli­ca­tions for this device in the com­ing months.  Pric­ing and avail­abil­i­ty of the Play­book have not been announced yet, but the tar­get release time is ear­ly 2011.
HP/Palm Topaz — webOS
HP is most like­ly going to make a tablet announce­ment dur­ing their upcom­ing event on Feb­ru­ary 9th, but as of this week (1/17/11) the web is abuzz with a leak of what appar­ent­ly is cur­rent­ly in devel­op­ment. The images that were leaked show some inter­est­ing ele­ments that this device will fea­ture, such as a front-fac­ing cam­era, a micro USB port, and no but­tons on the face of the device.  It seems that HP’s devel­op­ers are tak­ing their time on this one, but HP’s acqui­si­tion of Palm cre­ates a poten­tial real play­er in the ongo­ing “Tablet Wars”.  Who out there can say they did not own a Palm at some point? I myself have a draw­er of them.  If they end up mak­ing the bet­ter mouse­trap, I for one will come!
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