14 DAY TRIAL // The rise of the tablet market has begun to raise questions as to what this means for the netbook segment, and while some might think that auxiliary keyboards will favor the former of these two industry fields, some reports, or one of them at least, do not seem to share this view.
As consumers no doubt know, quite a few tablets have shown their faces over the past couple of months.
Granted, they might have their work cut out for them against the iPad 2, since most are a fair bit more expensive than it, but the fact remains that the tablet segment really has kicked off for real this time.
They are optimized for multimedia playback and can even play various games designed for the Android OS.
What's more, performance-wise, they, in general, actually exceed what common netbooks can accomplish. As such, even without physical keyboards, they have grown in popularity quite fast.
Still, what some customers may not be aware of is that first-tier tablet PC makers actually implemented support for external keyboards in their products.
A recent report made by Digitimes suggests that keyboard makers aren't that sure that such peripherals will really gain traction.
Apple did place a large order of iPad keyboards back in the second quarter of 2010, but the price was a bit too high, so it only led to inventory issues.
Based on this occurrence, it is believed that overall tablet keyboard sales won't be at all impressive, although tablets running Windows 7 will probably see more such peripheral sales than the rest.
All in all, the cited sources don't expect more than 20% of all slate owners to buy a keyboard of this type. Of course, considering that, originally, tablets weren't expected to sell well either, whether this assumption proves true remains to be seen.