Get ready for 'Tablet 2.0' |
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Editor's Note: Aaron Broder, a 16-year-old reporter for Scholastic News, is covering his fourth Consumer Electronics Show. (We originally met him here back in 2007.) He wrote this post for TechFlash under special arrangement. Aaron blogs regularly at allgeektout.com
You may not know it, but there’s something missing in the tech industry's lineup of computing devices. Somewhere between the one-to-five-inch screens of smartphones and small gadgets, and the 15-inch-and-up screens of a notebook, electronics manufacturers have left a gap. At this year’s State of the Consumer Electronics Industry Address, Shawn DeBravac, the Chief Economist and Director of Research for the Consumer Electronics Association, made it clear that it’s a void you can expect to see filled, and soon.
Already, progress has been made in two different areas -- e-book readers, like the Amazon Kindle and the Nook, are entering from one direction, and netbooks are entering from another. But DeBravac expects that these two devices will someday merge into a new type of device, which he calls the “Tablet 2.0." It would move these two devices beyond the niches that they currently fill and into a bigger market, standing alongside the smart phones and the laptops.
What direction the Tablet 2.0 takes largely depends on which of these two devices is more successful in the long run. “We now see a battle emerging for that 5-to-15 inches range,” said DeBravac, “as products want to take control and dominate that category.” Should the e-reader win, it will likely take the shape of a closed system, where content is restricted by what the manufacturer decides. Otherwise, the Tablet 2.0 will be closer to a netbook, which, as DeBravac explains, “comes from a more open, IT-centric approach.”
The first steps towards this device have already been taken. The Nook’s use of Android could be the sign of a much more flexible e-reader device coming. If rumors of the Apple tablet are true, then it will likely become one of the first of these devices -- a blend of the single- and multi-purpose.
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