In the immortal words of Antoine Dodson: “Hide your kids. Hide your wife. Hide your husbands, too, because the Tablet PCs are coming.” Well, maybe not his exact words, but the reality is that Tablet PCs are going to flood the market in 2011.
Unless you’ve been following Antoine’s advice and been hiding with your wife, kids, and husbands since April, then you’ve probably heard of the iPad. The iPad is the king of the Tablet PCs, and its success has left other companies scrambling to take advantage of this quickly growing market. Google’s Droid platform is being utilized for a whole slew of Tablet PCs, including one that sold out almost immediately at Kmart.
All of the hype leads us to the iPad 2, which according to this article may be coming sooner than you think. Apparently, a reputable newspaper (which predicted the iPad’s initial arrival) has been digging around the various factories in China and believes it has nailed down the various companies manufacturing the iPad 2. In fact, they’ve been able to identify some of the new parts of the new iPad, including the screen which is scaled down to 7 inches from the current 9.7 inches. This move is consistent with the chief complaint of the iPad, i.e. the size, and conforms to what the competition appears to be cooking up. A majority of the announced Tablet PCs appear to be providing screens in the 5 to 7 inch size range.
The next question surrounding the iPad 2 is price. It will be interesting to see what other improvements come with the iPad 2, or if it will simply be a smaller screen iPad. Either way, it will hopefully create a lower priced iPad to compete with the lower prices being offered up by the Tablet PC competition. Run and get that Tablet PC, homeboy.
