14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the iPad will soon see enough of a competition for Apple to truly start optimizing or redesigning it, now that forecasts put the sales of other tablets at a total of many million for 2011.
As end-users well know, most everyone was skeptical about the odds of tablets surviving on a market dominated by netbooks.
When Apple launched the iPad, however, the number of sales it scored was so high that practically every maker of PCs, along with developers of other devices, began to consider making their own media slates.
This led to many models, each powered by either the ARM of x86 architecture, until the Pine Trail platform and the Tegra 2 SoC, among others, started to stand out.
Regardless, tablets have been previewed and announced, some even began shipping, and it seems that 2011 will see many of them sell around the world.
Handset vendors that are bent on trying their luck at slates are apparently more inclined towards combinations of Qualcomm baseband chips and multimedia processors.
Notebook vendors, on the other hand, seem to have a better liking for GPU-baseband chip mergers.
Regardless, all of them intend to push their offerings next year, though most of them are intended to end up cheaper than Apple's iPad.
Digitmes now reports that, depending on how successful said companies are in their efforts, the total amount of tablets set to ship in 2011, excluding iPad sales, will be of 20 to 30 million.
What remains to be seen is how the Intel Oak Trail platform affects this segment and if any major changes will take place in terms of how much share ARM and x86 processors end up securing by the end of next year.
There is also the issue of how the iPad costs about $229-346 to make but sells for $499-829, (with storage of 16 to 64 GB), meaning that vendors of competing slates may not earn as many profits as they'd hope.