Computex, the world’s second-biggest IT trade fair, does not officially start until Tuesday but already the hype about which tablet personal computer will challenge the iPad as the hottest product of the year is in full swing.
The chief executive of Nvidia, the specialist graphics card company that is also a big supplier of chips for tablet PCs, kicked things off by making the prediction that within five years “tablets will be the world’s biggest computing category”. Jen-hsun Huang said tablets could even surpass netbooks and notebook PCs in terms of volume.
This is a bold claim, given that Gartner expects only 12m tablet-like devices to be sold this year and even the most optimistic projections say tablets would only take up 50m-60m of the 700m PC units sold by 2014. It’s also a jab at Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive who earlier said tablets would not “eat the notebooks’ and netbooks’ lunch“.
Mr Huang says, however, that three key factors missing in the past are now coming together to make this possible.
For tablets to succeed, the industry needed effective touchscreen displays, a mobile processor (such as Nvidia’s Arm-based Tegra processors, Mr Huang would say), and a suitable operating system.
While the first two have arguably already been present for a while, it was not until recently that Google’s Android emerged as a potent challenger.
“We finally have an operating system to unite behind . . . now we need to raise the bar” on what tablets are capable of, Mr Huang says.
As device makers unveil a host of new tablet PC models over the next few days of Computex, consumers and tech investors alike will certainly be looking to see which has really raised the bar on the iPad.
