14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that Apple has once again managed to announce a product that had a highly disruptive effect on the outlook regarding the tablet market, enough so that many companies may have to seriously rethink their roadmaps.
Last year, Apple managed to more or less completely prove skeptics wrong by launching the iPad tablet and selling it by the thousands almost immediately.
This made many smartphone and PC makers come up with their own designs, until some more mature tablets showed up at this year's MWC 2011 expo.
Then, of course, came the ongoing CeBIT trade show in Hannover, Germany, and Apple took this chance to take the industry pretty much by surprise.
Simply put, Apple delivered the iPad 2, even though most vendors didn't expect this product to come to market until the second quarter of 2011.
As it is, however, Apple is trying to press its advantage, meaning that other slate makers will have to speed up their own development plans.
That said, a recent report suggests that the likeliest time frame for companies' launch schedules is now late March.
There is also the fact that the first-generation iPad is now about $100 cheaper than it was before, even as Apple has been greedily snatching away most of the possible touchscreen orders.
As such, competitors will have to deal with not just pricing disadvantages and a serious head start on Apple's part, but may also end up unable to secure enough touch panels.
Currently, among the most prominent tablets on the market are the HP Touchpad, Motorola XOOM, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, RIM PlayBook, LG G-Slate and HTC Flyer.
With Gigabyte, MSI and others having Android 3.0 Honeycomb product of their own on sale or on the way, it remains to be seen which of all these IT players manage to outdo the competition.