14 DAY TRIAL // As always, some companies are more eager than others when it comes to engaging in a competition on a new market, and Samsung seems to be among the more determined tablet and smartphone makers if a recent report is to be believed.
As end-users know, quite a few tablets have been put on display at the Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona.
We actually have two colleagues on the site so we were able to land some hands-on photos of several models, like the ASUS Slider, Acer Iconia Tab A500, HP Touchpad, Motorola XOOM and LG Optimus Pad, among others.
Samsung, of course, also has an exhibition there, which includes its Galaxy Tab 10.1 Honeycomb (Android 3.0) tablet.
Overall, a real competition seems to be brewing on this new market segment that has already started to eat away at the market share of netbooks and notebooks.
Samsung is now said to be one of the players set on grabbing a large slice of it, even as it hopes to encourage shipments of its smartphones as well.
As a new Digitimes report has it, the company has placed a very solid amount of orders with NVIDIA for Tegra 2 SoCs (system-on-ship devices).
So far, the outfit doesn't have that much to show in terms of results, seeing as how its first slate, the Galaxy tab, fell short of the 2 million sales target.
They will mostly be used for the aforementioned Galaxy Tab 10.1, set to become widely available in April, meaning the second quarter of 2011.
Meanwhile, ASUS placed orders of 500,000 for the first half of 2011, for the Eee Pad Transformer and Slider EP102, among other things.
Other companies that have resolved to build upon the Tegra 2 platform are Dell, Acer, Toshiba, Micro-Star International and Motorola. Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) will most likely be adopted by all of them as the standard OS.