The Dawn of the Tablet Era

The concept of tablet-like portable computers is not actually new. Visionaries have dreamt about these gizmos for centuries and computer manufactures have tried to find their perfect form for years. But the one that really “get it” right is Apple with its iPad-which sold one million units in only 28 days. To put the number into perspective, that’s more than 35,000 units sold ever day or almost 1,500 units sold every hour. No other company or product has ever achieves this feat.

The iPad has created a new category of gadgets that sits between the smart phone and the computer/notebook. The gadgets is a perfect tool to browse the internet, manage e-mails, deal with documents, read e-books, watch movies, play games, show presentations, and do other stuff that people hadn’t thought about before, like displaying the musical scores for orchestra members, assisting doctors in managing their patients in the hospital, and replacing pen, paper and books in school.

The Egg of Columbus
And just like the story of the iPhone, the egg of Columbus cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Egg_of_Columbus) has repeated itself: once something remarkable is achieved, copying the idea is as easy as ABC. So other companies build “their own” version of tablet which is basically only copying he form factor of an iPad but varying its size. While the iPad screen size is set about 10”, those of copy cats usually come at around 17”.
As their operating system, most of these tablets use the open-source Android platform from Google, which was originally developed for smart phones, even though Google itself said that the latest version of Android (v. 2.2 – Froyo) is not ready for tablet use yet. And since everybody can develop their own version of Android, users will end up with a great many different versions of Android installed in different gadgets.
An immature operating system is not the only drawback these iPad wannabes have. The size choice is also said to be “too big to compete with smart phones and too small to be functionally comfortable as a tablet”, with a price range more or less similar to that of the iPad.
The number of applications available also falls way behind those on the iPad. For example, there is not even single app for Android that will allow users to do a screen capture, unless you are willing to “root” the device. (Note: “rooting” is the term that means hacking Android device.)


Looking Into the Future
Despite their current disadvantages, these Android tablets have several potentials that could make them viable rivals for the iPad, such as the ability to expand the storage space with an external memory card, the back-up from Google and all of its services, and the choices in variations, as there will be many companies ready to produce their own Android tablets.
As the moment, there aren’t too many of these small-size tablets available on the market. A few of the pioneers are Samsung, Archos, and Viewsonic. But we can be sure that there will be a stampede of tablets coming in the near future trying to get a piece of the “iPad craze” cake.
And with notebooks dubbed “cheap computers that are not good enough at doing anything,” we can say that we are now standing in the dawn of the tablet era.

Article by Y.J. Thurana @Cool ‘n Smart English Teen Magazine_Let’s Dance edition.