Take Two Tablets And…?

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been testing out Apple’s new iPad 2 against its most immediate competition, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1v. I should point out before I start this that I’ve been using an iPad (version 1) since Australian launch last year, whereas the Galaxy Tab 10.1v is much more of a newcomer. Android tablets have been available since last year, but the 10.1v is the first model in Australia to use Google’s tablet-specific version of Android, informally known as “Honeycomb”. Make of that potential bias what you will.

Pricing:
iPad 2 16GB: $579/$729
Galaxy Tab 10.1v: $729

The two pricing variants on the iPad2 are there as Apple offers it in both a with and without 3G option; if you see the cheaper iPad2, it’s the one that doesn’t offer mobile broadband, just WiFi. It’s pretty obvious that this is a clearly tied pricing race for comparable tablets, though.

There are catches to both approaches that may not be immediately evident. It’s possible to spend quite a bit more on an iPad2 — up to $949 — but that comes with increased storage capability, up to 64GB, where the 10.1v is a stock, set, unchangeable 16GB. On the flip side, the 10.1v, which is exclusive to Vodafone, is offered by the carrier under contract from as little as $39 a month with data included. From a budgetary perspective, that’s pretty compelling.

Look & Feel: Apple’s whole marketing schtick behind the iPad2 is that it’s slimmer than the original iPad, and this is indeed true; at 8.8mm thick it’s slender and tapered beautifully. The Galaxy Tab 10.1v is by comparison a chunky beast, but this hides something of a hidden advantage. The back of the tablet is textured and gently contoured inwards, making it easy to grip even without a case. By comparison, the iPad2’s back is relatively slippery unless you pop it in a case — at which point the thickness advantage goes away.

Base specifications: iPad2:  Screen: 9.7” 1024×768 Processor: Apple A5 Dual Core 1Ghz Memory: 16GB-64GB Galaxy Tab 10.1v: Screen: 10.1” 1024×768 Processor: Nvidia Tegra 2 Dual Core 1GHz Memory: 16GB  Again it’s pretty neck and neck; the larger screen of the 10.1v and improved resolution are nice, but the fact that it’s a fixed memory size is an oddity in the Android world and sticks out like a sore thumb.
Performance: This is a considerably more subjective thing, and a lot harder to call. There’s no doubt that Honeycomb is a much better version of Android than the previous tablets offered, as the native applications make better use of the screen space, the onscreen navigation is very snappy, the mail client works well and the browser is just that little bit quicker than the iPad2. Using the online Browsermark benchmark, I recorded a score of 88717 for the Galaxy Tab 10.1v compared to 70310 for the iPad2. If your application needs are modest, the Galaxy Tab 10.1v delivers nicely. The problem for Android is that there’s still a dearth of genuine “Honeycomb” applications for Android, and running older Android applications is a very hit and miss affair. Some scale up to the full screen neatly, while others occupy only a tiny area of the screen, or shrink everything down so small as to be useless. Comparatively, the iPad2 not only has a rich array of native applications on offer, but also scales up the vast majority of iPhone applications with only a little bit of pixel chunkiness as a drawback. Honeycomb should improve over time in this regard, but right now it’s not quite there.

Conclusions: The 10.1v is a solid iPad2 competitor, but it’s not quite there yet, and it’s something that Samsung’s all too well aware of. The company has already announced that newer models of the Galaxy Tab 10 will be forthcoming in slimmer frames and possibly with more storage. It’s good to see competition to Apple in this space, but for right now, I’d still say that the richer application infrastructure supporting the iPad2 makes it a better buy. If you’re staunchly anti-Apple for whatever reason, I reckon it’d still be worth saving your money for more Android tablets, and critically more native Honeycomb applications to hit the marketplace.

Are you still gaga for radio?

Radio’s one of those technologies that you probably don’t think about that much at all. It’s just there, for the vast majority of us it’s always been there, and aside from the shift for some music formats from AM to FM in the late nineteen seventies, there hasn’t been much of a technological shift in radio to speak of in the way there has been for television or in information technology in general. Digital Radio’s the latest theoretical shot in the arm for the radio industry, albeit one that’s still in an early growth phase in Australia.

Recently I attended the launch of a range of new Digital Radios from PURE, who are distributed by Pioneer Electronics within Australia. The new models do offer some interesting twists on radio listening. They’re internet radio equipped — hardly the only digital radios on the market to offer that — and have an inbuilt feature that will allow you to identify tracks by analysing them, similar to the Shazam application available for many smartphones.  Aside from the funky new models on display (some of which were just technically funky, while others sported patterns last seen adorning curtains in 1960’s sitcoms), PURE also revealed some rather interesting statistics on radio usage in Australia.

The growth of digital radio — if you happen to be in a digital broadcast area, which currently restricts you to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth right now, or trial services in Canberra and Darwin — has been slow and steady. In eighteen months, according to the figures PURE was touting (which were probably the Commercial Radio Australia figures you can read here, although it wasn’t clear: http://www.digitalradioplus.com.au/index.cfm?page_id=1048&display_news_id=1079) some 400,000 digital radios have been sold, and they count an estimated 700,000 digital radio listeners in the country. On a broader scope, putting all radio up for consideration, some ninety percent of the population listen to radio, and digital radio listeners apparently take in eleven hours of radio per week on average.

So will digital radio explode on the back of a few new models? It seems unlikely.

The lack of regional coverage is obviously an issue for travellers, but the current coverage area does address an awful lot of radio listeners; PURE’s estimate at the launch was something like 50-60% of the population were covered by digital radio already.

Where I suspect digital radio will live and die for take up is in the one area where it’s remarkably weak right now, and that’s in-car listening. Commuters listen to a lot of radio on the way to and from work, and right now there’s a genuine paucity of digital receivers for them to use. Even the prestige car brands are only now starting to add digital radio as an option in their car lines. BMW will apparently be first, with the option adding somewhere around $900 for the 7 Series and 5 Series models, but those are vehicles that aren’t exactly in the price range of the average punter.

Is it time to step up to a DSLR?

At a recent Canon event in Byron Bay (disclaimer: Canon paid for my transport and accommodation costs), I had the chance to get some hands-on time with a number of new consumer camera models; one point and shoot, pocket-friendly model, the Ixus 220HS, and two DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras, the EOS 1100D and EOS 600D respectively.

While digital cameras are still a relatively recent phenomenon seen against the entire history of photography, for that brief history the line between the casual happy snapper and the more interested photographer has been more or less maintained by the type of camera you chose to use. Happy snappers could get adequate pictures from point and shoot models, while those who yearned for more control or specific types of photography would make the costly trip into DSLRs.

All three of the cameras that Canon showed off subvert that kind of thinking. The $1099 600D and especially the $699 1100D are unashamedly “entry level” DSLRs with a lesser price point than more fully featured DSLR bodies, but equally more of a focus on automatic shooting, scene filters and an approach that is best described as “hand holding”. If you’ve never used a DSLR before, you can still take very good photos with these particular cameras.

There’s still clearly a price gap between the point and shoot models. It should also be noted that those prices for the DSLRs are without lenses; you’ll pay more for those, but then lens flexibility is a key function of any DSLR. Still, $699 for a DSLR with limited capabilities is pretty cheap. The best way to convey that? Canon’s top of the line DSLR body, the EOS-1D Mark IV, currently retails for a wallet busting $7299. It’s quite a lot more camera for your money, as you might expect.

At the same time, the $319 Ixus 220HS features some of the same creative filters you’ll find on the $1099 600D, albeit with less scope for tinkering, and naturally no prospects of adding different lenses down the line. As point and shoot cameras have become distinctly better, pushed both from below by mobile phone cameras and from above by the shrinking prices of DSLR models, the appeal of having something that easily fits in your pocket and still takes quite good photos is still present.

So what’s caused this shift in people wanting better cameras rather quickly? Mostly, that has to be a prime function of them being digital cameras. In the film past, you’d have to wait (and pay) for processing in order to ascertain whether a photo was any good. These days, wait a second or two, and you’ll know if it’s any good and delete it forever if it’s not. That’s opened up photography for a huge number of people who otherwise were only casually interested, and as it’s done so, they’ve become more aware of the upsides (and downsides) of particular camera models.

How much power does your IT equipment use?

Product Review:
Belkin Conserve Insight
RRP: $49.95

Tech devices use power — that much is quite obvious — but over time the amount of work that’s been put into power conservation has been considerable. Today’s laptops and desktops are more power efficient than ever before, but this is mostly so that vendors can talk up the battery life figures of systems.  With (at the time of writing) Earth Hour fast approaching, the subject of sensible power usage is at the forefront. The actual power and CO2 savings of Earth Hour are debatable (especially if you do things like light lots of candles to mitigate the loss of light), but it’s what you do with the knowledge gained going forwards that could make a difference.

If you’re not of a mind to be worried about the effect of power usage on the planet, you should at least see that the use of power when it’s not needed is an unnecessary drain on your own personal resources, namely the money that’s in your wallet. Power prices have risen in recent years, and it’s unlikely they’ll become any cheaper any time soon.

Belkin recently sent me a number of review samples from its Conserve range, including the Conserve Insight, a plug-in power meter. Belkin’s not alone in this field — many hardware stores will sell this type of simple power meter, and if you’re really keen, it’s possible to have whole-of-house (or office) meters installed as well.

The Conserve Insight is  a chunky standard pass-through plug with a meter attached, and the claim that it’ll help you work out your real energy costs by plugging your devices into it. This obviously isn’t limited to IT-style technology power metering, but for the purposes of experimentation, I used it to measure power draw in my office, which connects up surge protected power boards to a single wall socket plug. The idea with the Insight is pretty simple; as you plug in any electricity drawing device, the display shows the choice of cost, watts or CO2 production for that device. The cost and C02 production costs can be varied if you’ve got access to that kind of information; your power bill should certainly at least show you the kW/hr cost you’re paying.

With nothing plugged in, not surprisingly the cost and power draw were negligible. A single power board with a backup drive and a couple of attached chargers saw it spring up to between $26-$60 per annum. Belkin’s claim is that over time the Insight will “average out” your usage based on actual full power draw, which is reasonable enough; many devices draw a lot of power in the startup phase but less in operation, and some more efficient IT devices have very low hibernation power draw. Adding a second power board running some speakers and an office TV on standby saw it stick resolutely just above $60, but no longer down in the $20 range at all. Plugging in a PC, however, saw the figure jump very quickly up to $295, and a second PC saw that hop up to a scary $610 per annum. That fluctuated quite a bit, but again most PCs are pretty power hungry when they’re first starting up, and over a short while things settled down a touch.

Those are annual figures for cost, although I later worked out its inbuilt charging rate was a little lower than the price I actually pay; a 20% premium or so over those figures is more in line with actual usage.

The Insight (or any similar plug in charger) won’t save you a single cent or a single square centimetre of the planet without actually acting on the information you give it. In my case, that involved wandering around the thick layers of dusty cables to spot those things I could easily leave unplugged until absolutely needed, even if it seemed like they weren’t on or might only have a minor amount of standby power usage. Devices you’ll constantly be firing up and down might not need to apply, but it’s quite likely in the average office or home there are mobile phone chargers sitting around doing little but heating the room gently, speakers that aren’t doing much speaking to speak of and even laptops lying dormant waiting for your command. There’s a convenience to having a laptop spring to life at your command, but is it equal to the convenience of having air you can breathe or more money in your wallet at the end of the year?

Smartphones Head To Head

If you’re in the market for a new phone, you’ve got two choices. Buy outright, or pick up a phone on a plan. If you buy a smartphone outright, you’re typically looking at between $500-$1000 out of pocket; there are models that are both cheaper and more expensive than that, but it’s a fair average across the most popular models. That’s why contracts make a fair amount of sense. Not only do you shift the handset cost over a longer term (and potentially gain the ability to write it off against tax rather simply under certain business circumstances — but check with your accountant!), you also get the most generously provisioned rates for calls and data compared to most pre-paid plans on a handset you own yourself.

The problem is, most smartphone contracts cost pretty much the same irrespective of the model of phone you choose. Entry level points are now down around twenty dollars, but those are typically last year’s handsets being rushed out the door while they’ve still got stock. Between fifty to seventy dollars a month can get you the handset of your choice, including cutting edge models. It’s easy enough to test the physical layout of a phone by simply gripping it, but what about on the software side? With so many choices, which smartphone operating system do you go for? Here’s a brief rundown of the most prominent smartphone platforms and their pluses and minuses.

Apple iOS

Representative Handset: iPhone 4

Pluses: The largest applications marketplace for any smartphone, hands-down, which gives iOS a lot more flexibility in what can be done with it, especially in the realm of entertainment applications. The fixed hardware platform — basically just the nearly-obsolete iPhone 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4 — also means that all apps run optimally across handsets. iOS upgrades are regular and not subject to the approval of the carriers, meaning they’re usually a little faster than on competing platforms.
Minuses: Apple controls the iOS environment with an iron glove, which some folk plain don’t like; certain applications will never be approved for iOS as a result. There’s also no such thing as a “live” iOS application displaying twitter feeds, weather or the like. Everything is icon-based using push.

Android

Representative Handset: HTC Desire HD

Pluses: Google’s “open” smartphone OS is being rapidly picked up by just about every handset maker out there (excluding Apple and Nokia). That gives you a huge choice of handsets and price points, as well as a wide variety of features. Google’s tailored Android applications for its core search and gmail utilities are incredibly slick, and the applications market is growing rapidly. Applications can act as live widgets displaying up-to-date information constantly.
Minuses: The variety of handsets can make some applications behave in unusual ways, especially as application development isn’t a rigidly controlled as it is with Apple or Microsoft. Operating System software upgrades must be carrier approved before you can get them, which can lead to long delays in getting the latest version of Android for your smartphone — if it ever appears at all.

Blackberry OS

Representative Handset: Blackberry Torch

Pluses: Blackberry has long been the smartphone of choice for the business crowd, and its core competencies have remained the strength and speed of its email client, which simply blows the competition away. If you need email quickly (and want, on most Blackberry models, an excellent physical keyboard), the Blackberry is the one to get.
Minuses: Operating system upgrades are once again at the mercy of operators, and some handsets will get stuck over time. The excellent email service is part of a specific paid service, which (depending on the carrier) might not be the most cost-efficient way to get your email. The application library, like the devices themselves are largely productivity oriented, although this has changed slowly as more consumers have taken up the Blackberry brand.

Windows Phone 7

Representative Handset: Samsung Omnia 7

Pluses: Windows Phone 7’s “tiles” arrangement is amongst the simplest smartphone visual layouts of any smartphone platform, making it very easy to pick up and use. Xbox Live integration is built in for the gaming crowd, and the application market, while still quite small, is growing rapidly.
Minuses: There’s a relative dearth of available handset choices, although that’s likely to change with Nokia recently making the shock declaration that it would start building smartphones utilising Windows Phone 7. As yet for the existing models from HTC, LG and Samsung the full operating system upgrade path is quite unclear; even the patches to date have had a rocky history. At the time of writing, Cut & Paste functionality still wasn’t present, despite being promised as “coming soon” when it launched.

For any of these platforms it’s certainly well worth having a test run in a mobile phone shop to see not only which one may suit your needs, but also your style of smartphone use. Some users will prefer the full touchscreen setup of the iPhone or most Android models, while other users may favour the keyboards found on most Blackberry models.

Apple unveils iPad 2. Should you care?

That Apple had a revision of its iPad line of Tablet computers ready to go wasn’t a particular surprise, although the exact details of what they were going to release weren’t known until they announced it late last week. It’s not, despite anything that Apple might say, a revolution in tablet computing, and much more an evolution of the concept, adding a faster processor — a similar step to what you’d see in laptop computers, and even Apple itself did the same thing the week before with its Macbook Pro line — inbuilt cameras for Apple’s Facetime video calling solution and an overall thinner and lighter body.

Sight unseen, I’d have to say that if you’ve already got an iPad, this is a pretty easy iteration to skip. Sure, it’s faster, but the only other major new technology feature is the inbuilt camera, and the utility of these on tablets is questionable at best. It’s also worth noting that last year’s iPads — still very capable machines — are being sold out all across the land at what amounts to fire sale prices. For the capability you get, last year’s iPad at this year’s fire sale prices might just be the tablet bargain of the year.

At the same time as Apple’s unveiling the iPad 2, its competitors are lining up competing tablets at a fair pace. Blackberry has its Playbook due out before the middle of the year, Motorola has the Android-inspired Xoom tablet, Viewsonic has the Viewpad 10s already out on store shelves and Samsung’s taking a bet both ways. There’s an upcoming iteration of its Galaxy Tab Android-based tablet due out in a 10” form factor, similar to the iPad, as well as the 7 Series “Sliding” tablet, which runs full Windows 7. It’s a “Sliding” tablet because behind the screen lies a full keyboard and trackpad, so you can fairly quickly convert it from a straight up touch-based machine to a small notebook. Touch on Windows 7 has been one of those features that’s been baked in from the start, but not all that well set. Most Windows 7 applications simply aren’t built with touch in mind, so while it works, it’s never — to date — worked well. Having had a brief review session with the 7 Series, it might just be the tablet to break this particular curse, with more than a passing effort put into providing it with useful touch-based applications.

If touch-based computing makes sense for you — whether you’re looking at it from a pure consumer web-and-video style “consumption” model, or even as a portable productivity tool — it’s going to be an interesting year. As it stands, Apple’s decision to not radically tinker with the iPad 2 leaves the field quite open to competitors, and it could be worth waiting to see what comes to market, and at what price point before committing yourself.

The Fastest Wireless — That You Might Never Get

Wireless internet has changed the way we work, communicate and play, but it’s not without its limitations. There’s few things more frustrating than needing a net connection while out and about, and either struggling through sub-par speeds that waver between tediously sedate and annoyingly inadequate, or simply realising that you’re in a coverage blackspot and there’s no data coverage for you at all.

The major players are investing in new towers and the promise of improved coverage and improved speed, but the most recent and most exciting speed news I’ve seen came not from the “big three” telcos, but instead a carrier investing in an alternate wireless broadband technology.

I recently attended a public demonstration of Vividwireless’ trials with a new type of wireless, called  Time Division Duplex Long Term Evolution (TD-LTE).The trial network Vividwireless has set up runs between Redfern (the company’s Sydney base of operations, although it’s Perth-based in a national sense) and Zetland in Sydney’s inner city as well as Horsley Park in the outer west.  In the demonstration in Redfern, Vividwireless was able to hit an impressive 128Mbps download speed, although that’s on a low usage trial network with, I suspect, a single user. Still, the company is quite bullish about its prospects, suggesting that users may see between 40-70Mbps in real world usage. If (and it’s a big if) that’s true, then it’s a nice speed boost for existing wireless networks in this country. The next fastest contender, Telstra’s dual channel HSPA+ offers theoretical speeds up to a maximum of 42Mbps, but only promises speeds in the range of 1.1-20Mbps.

Vividwireless currently operates a WiMAX network in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, but with a severely limited coverage footprint largely centred around the CBD of each capital city. The company’s plans (which may involve a mix of WiMAX and TD-LTE) call for covering up to 90% of each capital city (and others are on track to be offered shortly, with Brisbane noted as being a little behind schedule due to the flooding). Still, that’s well below the coverage map of the existing broadband players, with the possible exception of Three, and there it’s rapidly becoming a sub-brand of Vodafone anyway.

There’s no doubt that extra speed is very nice to have if you can get it, and at this stage Vividwireless is still only trialling TD-LTE with no absolute commitment to implement it. Company representatives stated that the switchover in hardware for existing WiMAX networks would be a very simple process, but any additional rollout would take time and money, and they were still mulling the possibilities. To date, Vividwireless has offered some very aggressively priced wireless plans, including an unlimited $79 per month plan, but with a limited area in which you could use the data. Great for inner city dwellers, but not so much for those on the fringes or regional areas.

AMD’s Fusion of speed and budget processing

You may not care — or even know — what make of processor you’ve got inside your computer. The chances are reasonably high it’s an Intel part; depending on whose figures you read, somewhere around eighty percent of all processors sold are Intel processors. Still, that leaves twenty percent of the market running something else, and in most cases, that’s a processor from AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, if you wish to be formal.

AMD’s latest processor foray couldn’t be more different to the recently announced (and swiftly withdrawn) Intel “Sandy Bridge” processors. Sandy Bridge is (first and foremost) pitching at the high-end, high-specification market with some very nice processors if you’ve got the money. At the time of writing, however, Intel was scrambling to correct a problem with the accompanying chipset to Sandy Bridge, as the chipset (codenamed “Cougar Bridge”) had potential flaws in how it talked to SATA devices (hard disk drives and optical drives such as DVD or Blu-Ray) that could cause problems over time. If you bought one of the first Sandy Bridge PCs or laptops, you may well have issues, but at this stage it’s unclear if every system will have problems. For the moment, though, Sandy Bridge is off the market.

In any case, AMD’s solution to go head to head with high performance Sandy Bridge, is, simply put, not to do so at all. Instead, AMD’s latest “Fusion” processors come with a sparkly new marketing term and an initial pitch to the entry-level, long battery life, thin and light market. AMD refers to the Fusion processors not as CPUs (Central Processing Units) but as APUs (Acccelerated Processing Units), because they combine a CPU and reasonably high end graphics processor on the same chip. Intel does do that type of arrangement, but to date the integrated graphics that Intel’s offered hasn’t been particularly exciting stuff. AMD’s Fusion APUs, put up against the Atom processors that Intel supplies for many Netbooks make for interesting comparison, with AMD claiming eleven times the graphics performance, although things get murkier if you’re comparing some Core i3/i5 notebook systems to Fusion.

There will be a high-end version of Fusion, codenamed “Llano” available later in the year, but for now, the focus is on slim systems, netbook competitors and entry level priced systems. AMD has taken Intel on over the years in the value for money space, and it’s a fight that ultimately benefits us, the consumers, even if you don’t buy a Fusion PC. Competition breeds competitive pricing, and who doesn’t want faster and cheaper computing?

Macbook Air: Is Thin Enough?

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks testing out Apple’s second take on its ultra-portable laptop concept, the Macbook Air. When Apple launched the first model of the Air, I was somewhat interested by the very thin form factor, but totally taken aback by the price; more than two thousand dollars for a machine that wasn’t, to put it bluntly, even poking at the sides of being cutting edge a couple of years ago.

The Air comfortably fits into the category of what used to be called “ultraportables” right up until the first netbooks hit the scene and radically reinterpreted not only the size of notebook systems but most markedly their pricing. It’s undoubtedly something that’s affected the pricing of the Macbook Air (and many of the competing ultra-thin Windows equivalents), as the new models start at a much more moderate $1,199.

For a system as innately portable as the Air, that’s a pretty good buy, but it’s still not without its catches. The processor still isn’t cutting edge — an ultra-low voltage 1.4GHz or 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo — although the internal storage, which now only comes in solid state drive (SSD) format, is. Solid State Drives contain no moving parts, so they’re rather more durable than traditional hard drives, as well as drawing less power and running much cooler. The catch there is that they’re more costly, and as such, the entry level Macbook Air that I’ve tested comes with a slender 64GB of available storage. An external, older normal USB hard drive would seem like a very sensible choice for any Air purchaser.

The first model of the Air infamously had a single USB port that had to service any external peripherals, including ethernet ports, external drives and adaptors. The new model doubles that number, which at least means you could (for example) use a USB modem and USB storage drive at the same time. Like its predecessor, an optical drive is noticeably absent, although you can install software on a client PC or Mac to share an optical drive to the Air over a network.

I’ve used plenty of netbooks over the past couple of years, and the Air does neatly overpower them in terms of raw processing power. Where it’s technically feasible to, for example, edit a spreadsheet or adjust an image on a netbook, you need plenty of patience, and the Air does manage that a little better. Then again, Netbook prices have continued to tumble over time, so there’s still a fair pricing gap between a standard Netbook and the Air, or for that matter a fatter, more regularly specified PC notebook.

For heavy travellers, the light carrying weight, full sized keyboard and very quiet and relatively cool operation of the Macbook Air make a reasonable buying case. Those on more limited budgets, or who want the even smaller form of a netbook would do well to trawl the online stores, where some of last year’s models can be had for less than $500.

What does 2011 hold for the Tablet?

2010 was, if anything, the year of the Tablet. Apple kicked matters off convincingly unveiling the iPad in January, although it would be a couple of months before anyone could buy an official model locally. Since then, we’ve seen the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Tab and a couple of very low-cost Tablet alternatives from Telstra and Optus, along with a lot of noise about potential models from other manufacturers, but precious little to actually put your hands on.

2011 will see some of these models come to market. I recently attended the launch of Viewsonic’s range of tablets, called (not that inventively), Viewpads. Viewsonic will launch with two models; the Viewpad 7 and Viewpad 10. The 7 inch Viewpad 7 isn’t that dissimilar to the Galaxy Tab; it’s a 7″ Android based tablet running on Android 2.2, and at an RRP of $699, it’s also a fair chunk cheaper. That’s at least partly because it’s a lower specification tablet, with a slower processor, lower resolution screen and less internal storage. My brief initial hands-on suggests it’s a decent enough machine, although the units I tested with were early production samples, and it did show. I suspect there’s a solid enough market for lower-priced Tablets, although it’s still more than the comparable Telstra T-Touch Tab or Optus MyTab, both of which sell for less than three hundred dollars.

The Viewpad 10 is a slightly different critter. At $799, it’s not that much more expensive, and it pops the screen size up to an iPad-competitive ten inches. It’s also dual-boot capable between Android and Windows 7 Home Premium, which at least sounds interesting. To accommodate both operating systems, though, Viewsonic’s limited itself to Android 1.6, which limits the applications that’ll run on the Android side. On the Windows side, while Windows 7 is touch capable, that’s a different thing to being touch optimised. Windows software will run, but not always as you’d expect it to, and often in a way that’s less than ideal, as you struggle with onscreen keyboards and software that just assumes you’ve got a real mouse and keyboard. From my brief hands-on with the ViewPad 10, it also didn’t appear as though you could easily swap data from one boot partition to the other, although again this was an early unit and that might change.

Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry line of smartphones, also have an upcoming tablet product that should be made available here in the first half of 2011. The Playbook’s a WiFi-only tablet, which in itself is an interesting gamble. The idea is that RIM will sell it primarily to existing Blackberry owners, and most Blackberry owners enjoy unlimited Web access via their Blackberry smartphones. Tether a Blackberry to a Playbook, and what need do you have of inbuilt 3G? Other than the lack of 3G, the Playbook certainly sounds like it’s decked out with impressive hardware, including a dual-core processor, two HD cameras and inbuilt Adobe Flash support. Whether the larger, non-Blackberry using market will get all that excited about the PlayBook remains to be seen, especially as the device pricing remains a mystery.

Speaking of mysteries, there’s Apple. The company is famous for not saying anything about upcoming products, but the rumour mills are churning right now with speculation that an iPad 2 (for want of a better name) announcement is likely in early January. It’s taken most of 2010 for competitor tablets to catch up to Apple’s first iPad release. Whether Apple will reinvent the category again, or merely tweak around the edges with a new release will be very interesting to see indeed.

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