The tail end of 2010 was supposed to see a multitude of tablet releases. Fueled by the successful launch of Apple's first generation iPad device, companies left and right talked the talk about how they would all be coming out with slates of their own in the near future, but few walked the walk. Delays and other factors pushed what we expected to be 'the year of the tablet' into 2011, and while we've seen a handful of slates make it to market, are we due for an avalanche of tablets anytime soon?
We're all for promoting technology in schools and teaching kids how to use a command a line, but do kindergartners really need an iPad? The state of Maine apparently thinks so and plans to spend $200,000 equipping more than 300 incoming kindergarten students with Apple's iPad 2 tablet. That means when they're not eating glue or sticking crayons up their noses, they can fire up a $500 tablet and get in a game of Angry Birds.
The sky isn't falling, the world isn't about to end, and PCs aren't dying. Why, then, is market research firm Gartner bugging out? Call it an overreaction or a temporary blip as tablets settle into the marketplace (or a little of both), but according to Gartner, worldwide PC shipments totaled 84.3 million units in the first quarter of 2011, a 1.1 percent slip from the same period one year ago. Doesn't sound like much, but Gartner says the shipment results are indicative of a potential sluggishness, not just a normal seasonal dip.
Motorola might have been the first to market with an Android Honeycomb tablet, but its next tablet could very well be based on Gingerbread instead of the tablet-specific OS. That’s according to an Engadget article detailing Motorola’s plans for an enterprise tablet. Hit the jump for more.
Long gone are the days that you had to stay tethered to your desktop to check email, surf the Web, play games, and get work done. It's all about computing on the go, and even a 'slow' year in the mobile PC market still ends up being a pretty good year overall. According to market research firm DisplaySearch, mobile PC shipment growth will scale back a bit in 2011, but remain incredibly strong overall.
Netbooks, as popular as they became, never fully embraced the concept of dual-booting operating systems. A handful talked about releasing dual-booting netbooks, even fewer actually did, not including pre-boot environments like SplashTop. Should companies building tablets look to resurrect the idea of multiple OSes on a single device? We don't know, but Gigabyte intends to find out.
Intel is pulling out all the stops to get a foothold in the mobile and embedded device markets currently dominated by British chip designer ARM. Both the “Oak Trail” Atom platform that Intel began shipping to OEMs a few days earlier and its 32nm successor, codenamed Cloverview, are capable of running Android. 
Logitech is launching a new app for iPad owners that will allow for remote viewing and management of their Logitech Alert digital video security system from any place they take their tablet. It's called "Logitech Alert," and it's just one of a family of apps Logitech says it is designing for the iPad. With it, iPad owners who left their notebook at home can still check in and make sure everything is as it should be.
If there's one thing Apple is great at doing, it's following the planned obsolescence model. What we mean by this is that Apple is notorious for releasing products that are either functionally dated from the get-go, or have a limited shelf-life due to missing features. The recently released iPad 2 with its janky cameras, lower than Full HD resolution, and half the amount of RAM as competing tablets (512MB versus 1GB on the Xoom, for example) is a good example of this. With many viewing the iPad 2 as an incremental update over the iPad 1, then is it so hard to believe the Internet rumors suggesting Apple will release an iPad 3 in the third quarter of this year?
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