Sunday, January 10, 2010

A Deluge of Devices for Reading and Surfing
By Brad Stone and Nick Bilton
Published New York Times: January 8, 2010

LAS VEGAS — You’ve heard of Amazon.com’s Kindle. And you probably know that Apple is likely to introduce a tablet computer this year. Soon you may also be hearing about the Alex, the Que proReader and the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.

Photo left by Stuart Isett for The New York Times
Lenovo’s hybrid PC that detaches to become a tablet netbook device.

Photo right by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
The new E6 electronic reader from Samsung.

Those products are part of a new wave of slender touch-screen tablets and electronic reading devices that dozens of companies, both well known and unknown, brought to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

Some of these gadgets allow people to read for long periods of time without eye strain and without killing the batteries. Others focus on allowing their owners to surf the Web, watch video and play casual games without being tethered to a bulky laptop and its traditional keyboard.

“There are a billion and a half Internet users on the planet today, and a lot of them are primarily using it for entertainment and social networking,” said Glen Burchers, director of global consumer segment marketing at Freescale, a chip company hoping to power the new tablets. “The PC does a good job on a lot of things, but it’s just not the ideal device for surfing the Internet or reading.”

Tablets, of course, have been around for years. In 2001, Bill Gates erroneously predicted at an industry trade show that they would be the most popular form of PC sold in America within five years.

Now advances in technology and manufacturing are belatedly making good on the early promise of this idea. So-called ARM processors — the low-power, low-cost chips found in many cellphones — are finally robust enough to take on some of the tasks, like Web surfing, that were previously the domain of full-fledged computers. As a result, companies have been able to build a wider range of devices, including thinner products with longer battery life.

At the same time, the big Asian manufacturers like Foxconn of Taiwan have been adding capacity and are now capable of churning out these devices at an ever-decreasing cost.

Recently, anticipation for new tablet computers has been almost absurdly focused on the magical product that people expect to emanate from the mind of Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs.

Analysts who have spoken to Asian component suppliers now think that an Apple tablet will ship by the end of March, and that Apple will hold an event to introduce a new product by the end of this month.

But Apple’s tablet may not end up dominating the emerging market for tablets, as some seem to expect. One reason is price. Analysts think the Apple tablet could cost anywhere from $700 to $1,000. In contrast, the tablet design unveiled by Freescale this week will cost around $130 to manufacture and could sell for as little as $200.

More at NYT.

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