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.

“Daily” iPad Newspaper Set for January Launch

“Daily” iPad Newspaper Set for January Launch, article.
...it will use lots of video and it will have cool multimedia bells and whistles, including some kind of 3-D effect that lots of people are very excited about...
Most important for other media companies: The Daily is supposed to use a new “push” subscription feature from Apple, where iTunes automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, and a new edition shows up on customers’ iPads every morning.

I think this is the first major newpaper/multimedia vehicle created from scratch for digital delivery. Kinda interesting, especially the price, 99 cents per week. Now that's a reasonable price.

I always find newspapers incredibly boring, I'm not interested in 98% of what they talk about. But this new format I find interesting, it could be used for so many kewl things.

By the way, when people say "ereaders", they tend to only think "books". I think that needs to change, much more reading is happening with magazines and newspapers. And a proper ereader needs to handle this speedily and well. And sorry, I don't think the Kindle does that, the iPad is the only thing for it so far. (Though I still think we need a bigger, but light-weight, iPad for a real immersive experience in this area.)