Tablets galore on tap at major CES gadget fest

Tablets galore on tap at major CES gadget fest, article.
[I'm surprised at how good Yahoo reporting often is, given that it's not their business and surely not a profit center.]

This is a good and precisely written article coming out just before the huge CES tech gathering in early 2011 in Las Vegas. (David Pogue usually goes.)

2010 of course was dominated by Apple's smash hit the iPad. From the article:

"We are going to be up to our armpits in crappy tablets, and I do mean crappy," said independent Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle.

This may be regrettable, but we should remember that crap tends to follow in the wake of a Good Big Idea, just as debris tends to get sucked into the wake of a big ship.

"Right now, in the consumer electronics space, Apple is the shining star that everyone and their brother are chasing," Enderle said.
"CES is increasingly becoming an Apple show even though Apple is not there."

It is ridiculous for a company to be so powerful in any industry that they are dominating in the biggest show gathering in the industry, even though they don't attend and never have!

It's predicted that between 40 and 80 new tablets will be shown at the show. This is a very loose number, admittedly, but also a very high one, and I will just give up totally trying to follow what is being released, and just trust that the cream will rise to the top and come to my attention.

It will be good for the Samsung Galaxy Tab to get competition in the Android market, since while it's very good, it's also way too expensive at roughly the same price as the much bigger iPad.

That may be something we won't really see this year: tablets as big as the iPad. Will we? Somebody said that Apple is buying all the available screens for the iPad, so other more or less have to make smaller (seven-inch) tablets. I hope it's not true, because there is a big usability difference between the seven-inch Galaxy Tab and the ten-inch iPad, and I hope to see more big tablets.