Tablet Touch Off: new contenders in the works to compete with iPad

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The iPad will not go unchallenged in the tablet market much longer.

Its competition is known as the BlackBerry PlayBook, the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the HP Slate.

Will Apple’s black multitouch slab remain king of the hill? Novi junior Christopher Zamplas thinks so.

“The iPad is the tablet of choice almost solely because of the app store and because of the community behind it,” he said. “It’s like when you buy a Nike shoe, you pay $25 for the ‘swoosh,’ not necessarily because it’s a better shoe. The same thing happened with Apple and the iPad.”

Zamplas has owned an iPad for six months.

“I purchased one because I needed something a little bit more mobile than my laptop — something I could carry around and use,” he said.

Zamplas’ iPad sports the iOS operating system and Safari Web browser, a 9.7-inch display, a 1GHz Apple A4 processor and a mere 256MB of onboard memory.

Compared to the hardware of upcoming tablet devices, the iPad is severely outgunned, he said.

New tablets

Though no official pricing models or release dates are available for the upcoming tablet contenders, there is a rundown of the rumored specs.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is powered by Google’s Android operating system and will be available for various wireless carriers, such as AT&T, Sprint, T-mobile and Verizon Wireless.

The device includes 512MB of onboard memory — twice the amount included in the iPad — in addition to a slimmer, lighter design that features a 7-inch multitouch display and a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor, according to the product’s website.

It will also offer video conferencing through a 3-megapixel rear camera and a 1.3-megapixel front camera, and is available with 16 or 32GB of onboard storage with flash support and an option for expandable memory.

According to a leaked internal memo from Hewlett-Packard,  the HP Slate tablet will sport an 8.9-inch display and will run Windows 7 as its operating system.

The device will be powered by a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of onboard memory with expandable memory options and will be available in a 32 or 64GB onboard-storage version.

The Slate also offers flash support in addition to USB capabilities, HDMI outputs to connect to a monitor or television and a VGA front camera with 3-megapixel rear camera.

Finally, the BlackBerry PlayBook will be similar to the Galaxy Tab in terms of size. The PlayBook offers a 7-inch multitouch display brought powered by the BlackBerry Tablet operating system, a 1GHz dual-core Cortex A9 processor and 1GB of onboard memory with no expandable memory options.

The device does offer a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 3-megapixel front camera, making it the tablet of choice for video conferencing and photo.

Onboard storage options have yet to be announced.

Though the iPad will support multitasking with the iOS 4.2 software update in November, the new tablets support multitasking right out of the box.

Zamplas said Apple’s multitasking feature will disappoint iPad users when the update hits.

“I don’t think the iPad’s hardware can handle multitasking the way Apple wants to implement it,” he said.  “It’s not going to be the same way you can multitask on a computer. It will be like closing one application to open another, only you won’t lose your work — that’s Apple’s idea of multitasking.”

The future

Despite the increase of competitors in the tablet market, Zamplas doubts a substantial market exists.

He said tablets are useful for things that don’t require a full computer, such as Web browsing, watching video and checking e-mail.

However, limited hardware options mean tablet devices are not feasible replacements for laptops or PCs, he said.

“I think there is a future for tablets somewhere,” Zamplas said. “I don’t think tablets really will ever be as mainstream as people want them. You cannot use an iPad or an HP Slate as your primary computer, it’s just not capable of doing everything you need it to do. I don’t think they’re worth $600 to the average user.”

Paul Albee, a computer science assistant professor, said while tablets are a step toward the future, they are limited in functionality.

“Computationally, they are quite weak,” he said. “The processors don’t have a lot of processing power. They are, honestly, a little on the small side. I don’t think they’re the wave of the future, at least not the current ones, but I don’t think they’re a fad either.”

Albee said tablets are great e-book readers and have tons of interesting applications, but have little to offer the average consumer.

He said their lack of physical keyboards deter his interest.

“It’s almost completely useless to me as a standard computer,” Albee said.

For tablets to be useful computation devices, they need increased processing power, the ability to better utilize multitasking functionality, and full, standalone operating systems, he said.

“I think five to ten years down the road, we might be beyond tablets at that point, but it’s hard to say,” Albee said. “If something like a tablet will continue to exist, it’s going to have more computing power, more memory and probably a better user interface.”