Tablet Contenders Are in the Wings

Jeremy Glaser: For Morningstar, I am Jeremy Glaser.

I am here on the floor of the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. One of the big questions coming into the show was: Would all the tablets that were going to be shown here be able to measure up to Apple's offering, and would Apple really put on a defensive front based on some of the devices that are being released here.

I think that in some of the cases the answer is yes. There are some really impressive new products that are being announced or that will be shipping to consumers in the next couple months that I think are really going to make a lot of people think twice about exactly what kind of tablet they want.

I think the one that jumps to mind as the most impressive to me is Motorola's Xoom. This is a new device that will run on Verizon Wireless' 3G for now and eventually their 4G wireless network. It runs Google's latest Honeycomb tablet software that was really written specifically for tablets from the ground-up. It just runs on a really nice piece of hardware.

I think the thing that really was the most impressive about it was the software, in that it really seems like something that's much more usable in a lot of ways than the iPad. The widgets that live on the home screen are easy to get to, easy to just see your e-mail, check the weather, look at photos at a glance, not having to launch that specific application, and then you have access to the entire Android market that you can run on the tablet. So all of those applications that have already been written for Android phones will be available on those kind of tablets. So I think you look at a device like that, and it looks very impressive.

Samsung has a number of Galaxy Tab tablets. These are little bit smaller. They are in a seven-inch form factor, and these I think maybe have a little bit less mainstream utility. I think the small size makes them maybe better suited for a corporate environment, sort of a point-of-sale type implementation or however corporations would like to use it.

But certainly it's a really nice piece of hardware, very solidly built. Again, it's running a version of Android, though the cellphone version of it, not a tablet version of it, but I think that's something that will likely change over time, that Samsung will be able to port over that new software to the hardware.

That being said, not all the tablets are necessarily winners. I think you're going to see a lot of things announced here and lot of things that might even launch, but not all of them are necessarily going to be successful.

We looked at a few Android tablets that were just really very clunky, very plasticky feeling. The software was not responsive at all, just very underpowered, very difficult to use, and I don't see those really being mainstream devices. And if you look at BlackBerry's Playbook, we got a chance to take a look at it, and it really wasn't a device that was all that exciting. It looks really great. I think they did a great job with the industrial design, but the software doesn't look like it's a 100% there yet. It's certainly a built-from-the-ground-up BlackBerry Tablet OS, and I think they really need to get the developers onboard to make those applications that will make it a compelling product.

I think for the enterprise market--who you think would be a natural fit for the BlackBerry brand and for the BlackBerry product--it seems to have a lot of consumer focused features. So they talked a lot about the way that it plays videos and the way that you can go on YouTube and do social networking and those kind of applications. And granted, we're at the Consumer Electronics Show, so obviously that's what they're going to focus on, but it seems like they're kind of missing exactly who the core customer is for a product like the Playbook.

Again I think it's a nice piece of hardware. I think it's going to need some time to mature, but at the same time you have what seems to be a pretty mature Google product. You see Motorola coming out with some great hardware. You see some other people coming out with nice pieces, and I think they're going to be a real threat to the iPad. I think Apple's going to have to – in their updates -- are really going to have to add those cameras, they're going to have to add better software, better multitasking, better ways to get notifications other than the intrusive notification system they have now. I think they have a lot of work to do. They had big lead I think in this sector for a while, and I think it will diminish if they don't introduce some new products pretty soon.