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End User gadgets phones

26 tablets announced at CES last week 15 = Android

photo in the picture is of graffiti taken by Sue Davies

It’s mind boggling how many new tablets were announced last week at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show – 26 according to Pocket-Lint. What can we derive from this, other than the fact that everyone is convinced this is a market to invest in?

Competition is great and breeds choice. Just to pick a couple of metrics the prices ranged between $399 and $999 (thats probably £399 and £999 if are UK based – doesn’t sound right I know).  Also the screen sizes on offer were 4″, 5.5″,  7″,  8″, 9″, 10″ and 10.8″. Wow! If one of those doesn’t do for you I don’t know what to say! 🙂

I’m not going in to the other wide variation in feature set because actually it will all very quickly settle down into a standard list of “must haves” reminiscent of the PBX market and in my recent experience the TV market.

I bought a TV two weekends ago (note still not delivered – PC World). when you chose a TV you look at screen size, number and type of sockets and refresh rate – they all support 1080p. Prices occasionally vary depending on who is doing a promo that day. That’s it in my book. It will be interesting to see how the tablet market matures but it will be very similar.

The other metric I looked at was operating systems which gave the most interesting results (and I realise that the total doesn’t add up to 26 – complain to Pocket-Lint)

Android –     15

Windows 7 –  4

Linux –          1

Apple –         0

BlackBerry –  0

Unknown –     3

There is a clear winner – I realise it isn’t fair to say that Apple and RIM have no new products but they didn’t announce anything at CES. I might almost say it isn’t worth announcing anything at CES because there is so much noise.

I’m not saying that Microsoft is not in the game but this certainly gives food for thought.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

6 replies on “26 tablets announced at CES last week 15 = Android”

You missed one of the more important TV facets- panel type. Plasma, LED and LCD all produce different results which will affect depth of colour and quality of picture. I guess it’s less important for someone like yourself who doesn’t watch much TV though 🙂

As for tablets, have not seen the need for another device to carry around yet if it doesn’t replace something I already have.

john

Back to TVs…

I also look at the type of receiver/tuner. i.e Freeview HD is becoming more widespread and I wouldn’t buy one now that only had Freeview.
Freesat built in etc. might be what some people are after.
I also want networking and built in iPlayer etc. – lots of new internet aware options are coming our way… 🙂

I brought a cheap-o one from China that has Android on, albeit just so that I could play around with it without fear of breaking the bank like you have with Apple’s iPad. Not the best bit of kit but after flashing some custom roms it does end up doing a pretty good job of the basics.

However if anybody else is thinking about doing this then get one with a proper Cortex A8 CPU or faster, anything less isn’t well enough supported and you just can’t get good JIT support with the android builds.

Yea well I realised that TVs had a bit more to them but I thought I’d keep it simple:).

What was quite funny was that when I bought it I asked the salesman to educate me as to the relative importance of the different parameters. He intelligently took his specs off to read the promo stuff and then just read it all out. His training (or total lack of) amounted to being able to compare two TVs just by screen size, contrast ratio etc. In the end I made sure it had the basics and bought on the fact that they had knocked a hundred quid off it for that day only. It’s now back to it’s previous price 🙂

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