Laptop Thoughts: News & Reviews on Laptops, Netbooks, Slates, and More.

"Gartner forecasts that Apple's lead in the media tablet market will last until 2015 - and even then it'll be 47 percent of the market."

Interesting to see that Gartner is also trying to gaze into their crystal ball and predict the future in the tablet space. They do appear to have some insight (and credibility) into the market, and they base their predictions on seeing parallels between the tablet market and the iPhone emergence from a few years ago. They say that Apple competitors are repeating the mistakes made trying to play catch-up in the smartphone space, focusing on hardware over user experience, services and applications. Being business-oriented, Gartner also predicts that the PlayBook/QNX will garner a market share of 10% by 2015. Oddly, variations of Windows are ignored.

"Over the next four weeks, at least three new tablets are expected from Samsung, Motorola, and Research In Motion. The good news? They're Wi-Fi only, which will keep their cost down and appeal to consumers looking to avoid high-priced tablets or lengthy carrier commitments for mobile broadband data plans. Now, the bad news: Their timing isn't great, which will likely dampen sales. Plus, WiFi-only pretty much eliminates them as contenders for desirable devices with integrated 3G."

The next few weeks should see a slew of WiFi (only) tablets released, but have the manufacturers missed their window of opportunity? Too little, too late? Research has found that the "sweet spot" for a tablet seems to be $351, while $524 was the "too expensive" spot. So the WiFi tablet prices seem spot-on. But, then there is the whole "ecosystem" ("what it can do") question again: Android 2.2 has apps, which may or may not be optimized for a tablet form factor, Android 3.0 is still short on apps, and QNX (PlayBook) is an unknown at this point. And, with estimates of iPad 2 sales being between 700K and 1000K for the first weekend, Apple is not standing still waiting for the competition to catch up. With a poll showing that 75% of potential buyers would prefer WiFi only, there seems to be a market, but the "other" manufacturers need to get in the game, and deliver quality full-function products.

"It looks like we might have spoken too soon. At this year's BlackBerry DEVCON, the possibilities are endless for Research In Motion. They have plenty of pent-up rumors and speculation being thrown around. Most of that around the BlackPad, the first tablet from the house that built BlackBerry. And, sure enough, RIM is working on a tablet device."

Pretty interesting announcement! For those of you not familiar with QNX (Que-nix), the basis for the PlayBook OS, it's a realtime POSIX OS (RTOS) developed in Canada in the early 1980s that was designed to be small, modular, symmetrical multi-processor capable, fast, and utterly reliable. In fact, back in the day it was used in all sorts of process control applications, and has evolved into controller software for many industrial applications. I even remember reading somewhere that it is (or was) used for controller software for nuclear reactors and is even used in Cisco IOS-XR Routers (BFRs). So, reliability? Oh yes. Can we expect the PlayBook to be fast? Oh yes. Am I eagerly awaiting this tablet? Oh yes!

Technical details: 9.7mm thick and weighing about 400g (less than 1-pound), the PlayBook will feature a dual-core Cortex A9 1GHz CPU, dual HD cameras, have 1GB of RAM, and a 7-inch display at 1024x600 resolution. It'll play hardware accelerated 1080p video (with Flash support), and has non-proprietary HDMI and USB connectors. It is a Wi-fi only device, but should support tethering to a BlackBerry. Additional details (like 3G and 4G support) to be announced by RIM, and availability is said to be early 2011.