Even though the Microsoft 8 tablet, Android, Amazon Kindle and other big players are generating competing tablets, Apple’s iPad is still dominating the market. The giant held over 61,5% of the market share in Q3 2011. Apple Insider has recently documented a hike of 156% sales for the new iPad alone. Apple definitely sets the bar for the industry!

What makes these tablets so special?

Tablets sport a curvy outline that gives them a nice aesthetic. The portability of the device enables users to carry it around in a bag instead of sitting in front of a booting-up computer. Portability counts definitely as the most essential feature. The convenient touchscreen adds a qualitative value to the design. Moreover, the cloud applications offer top-notch features that upgrade the customization.

At first, the primary use of tablets was entertainment focused. For instance, we can iterate a plethora of entertaining activities: play games, book reading, video consumption. With the device, users can accomplish basic tasks like email checking and rapid browsing.

Hence, tablets have recently penetrated inside the workplace environment. It is no longer a unique domestic product. Tablets are organically ideal to surf on the Internet, to be carried around on a business journey. No need to wait to be in the office to deliver a presentation.

Many users are said to be using the tablet to download applications to boost existing functionalities. It turns out that tablets are operating as real time savers. In many ways, they offer a new way of interaction and communication for personal and professional purposes. Some users are bluntly transforming their tablets into a computer by adding accessories such as external keyboards or using tablets themselves as second monitors in their desktop setup. Though the tablet craze is showing no signs of slowing down, statistics demonstrate that tablet owners don’t plan to give up on their laptops anytime soon.

Despite minor restrictions such as the lack of Flash or Silverlight support on the iPad, tablet owners believe that tablets are trustworthy when it comes to reviewing and editing business documents while out of the office. Tablets incorporate a new way to attend conferences by taping them and chat with partners. Moreover, at a meeting, incredibly handy, they replace the spreadsheet to pass around the table so that prospective clients can view live demos. It is clearly more productive than a projector to deliver important information. Finally, professional users’ behavior shows that bring-your-on-device at work is a booming trend. The “BYOD” is now a privilege that professionals embrace fully.

In the mean time, the growth curve of PCs has reached a steady 1.8 %. A respectable 353.3 million units were sold over the market for 2011. However, the PC anemia has spread worldwide. In early 2011, IDC market research quoted a drop-off of 2.6 million units since 2010 for PC materials including PC, desktop, laptop and mini-notebook computers.

The expectation from tablet lovers is that eventually the PC will go the way of the dinosaur.

While there are apps doing that pretty well, they mostly come with the limitations of geoblocking by the app itself or country-restrictions imposed by the App Store.

One exception should be mentioned here: “FilmOn” – an app capable of streaming a seemingly endless variety of European TV channels for free. Until late 2011, when the manufacturer of the app decided to sabotage its own popularity by drastically reducing its channel lineup to a meager, insignificant bunch of low quality streams.

XBOX Media Center Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Solution

Lucky for all of us, time goes on and the open source community keeps churning out amazing pieces of free software. One of them, XBMC, keeps getting better with every release, spreading pure media center goodness over almost every available OS. While the basic install offers everything to your heart’s desire, XBMC really shows off its potential with the multitude of free plugins available for it. One of them, “NaviX” can turn your XBMC into a potent TV streamer at no cost! The extension holds hundreds of TV channels from around the world, many of them in HD.

How to get XBMC (and NaviX) working in your iPad

Note:The following videos apply to iPad as well.

1. Jailbreak your iPad
By default, XBMC is not available as your standard app. This is where jail breaking comes into play. First, you will have to run a jailbreaking-app like Absinthe and then install Cydia.

2. Install XBMC
Then, simply check the following instructions on how to get XBMC running on your iPad.

Download and install the plugin on your XBMC, now running on your iPad.
Once the application is running on your iOS, you are ready for NaviX!

3. Install NaviX
Assuming that you were able to make any sense of the previous instructions, you are just one step away from free streaming TV on your iPad.
Follow these instructions on how to install NaviX on your XBMC:

4. Find “TVSector” and enjoy!
Now the fun part: Look for the feature “TVSector” within NaviX.

Be dazzled and amazed by the amount of TV channels available!

Enjoy!

Starting at 499$ for the 32GB model, it comes in amethyst gray and champagne gold colour, has a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera and an 8 megapixel back facing camera with a LED flash.

The speaker, which has a fairly good volume, is located under the back on the right side. Not the best place since that is where we place our hands to hold it. But it can always be flipped around.The cool thing about this tablet is its dock, which turns it into a laptop equivalent. The dock is the full QWERTY keyboard and the tablet slides right on top of it. Even with the dock, this tablet is still not as thick as a laptop and it’s much lighter. The dock now has slimmer dimensions so its unfortunately not compatible with the 1st generation Transformer tablet. The dock even offers a USB 2.0 port and a SD card reader, and costs about an extra 150$! But the good part is there is a battery in the dock so it recharges the tablet when in place. The battery life is said to be 18 hours with the dock, 12 hours without it.
A mouse can be plugged via the USB port, although there is a small trackpad that works well for scrolling.

The 10 inch tablet offers a 1280 x 800 display with a brightness maximum of 600 nits, which is much more than most other tablets, making it a very nice tablet with nice color contrasts, even when the screen is turned. ASUS claims an ultra-wide 178-degree visibility and ultra bright Super IPS, so even the color contrasts stay when the screen is turned side-ways! The panel is protected by scratch resistant Corning® Gorilla® Glass.

It sports the new Tegra 3 chip for low power consumption and high performance for playing audio and video. The Prime comes with Android 3.2.1, in which is included a number of amendments :

• Bug fixes and minor security, stability and Wi-Fi improvements
• Update to Android Market with automatic updates and easier-to-read Terms and Condition text
• Update to Google Books
• Improved Adobe Flash support in browser
• Improved Chinese handwriting prediction

The prime come with 1080P Full HD video playback, 3D games and pre-installed apps such as:

@vibe Music, Amazon Kindle, App Backup, App Locker,Big Top THD, Bladeslinger, Google Books, Davinci THD, File Manager, Glowball, Movie Studio, MyCloud, MyLibrary, MyNet, Netflix, Photaf Lite, Polaris Office, Press Reader, Riptide GPkShadowGun, SuperNote, WebStorage, yskk, Zen Pinball THD and Zinio.

All in all, a very good tablet for the price.

Devices such as the iPhone register a finger’s position by the alteration it causes to the current that is permanently being passed over the surface of a touch screen. A regular glove prevents a finger from being registered, while a glove made of conductive yarns will allow for a normal touch experience. This is why the company’s Saleem Najerali with his numerous contacts in the clothing industry tracked down the conductive materials, had prototypes of the gloves made and then manufactured.

Since the launch in September, the company has already sold about 4,000 pairs of gloves and is now being sold by Wind Mobile, Rogers and Telus stores.
One caveat: The gloves will only protect you up to -10 C.

The device runs an open-source software that will support MP3 playback, drawing, handwriting recognition and PDF and text viewing.

The NoteSlate is supposedly coming out in June, in a classic white background, black foreground version AND the reverse as well, both with a price only $99(!). Also up for grabs will be a “4 colour edition”, probably with a much steeper price tag than the B&W version.

Alternative for those who can’t wait

If you really can’t wait until then device comes out, there is another option: the “Boogie Board” from Improv Electronics. With no connection back to the computer, this paperless LCD writing tablet offers up to 50,000 erase cycles, before you can trash it along with your new years resolutions from last December.

Improv Electronics Boogie Board

The good: you can draw on it with anything that applies pressure and it comes in 6 colours and with an affordable price tag of only $30.

Then again, you could just stick with your old chalkboard until the NoteSlate becomes available.

Image via Wikipedia

Until they released the Cintiq 21UX. This was a whole different ball game: a 21-inch touch sensitive on-screen drawing experience, basically a haptic extension of your monitor. With one flaw: the price tag. The current model will set you back a whopping $2.000!

Admittedly, the professional matte painting artist will make that his daily weapon of choice, while my occasional doodle can certainly be done with an old school Intuos. Well, it seems like I won’t have to make that “compromise”no more: The Tablets are coming!

HTC is back with a surprise

While this seems to be becoming the year of the invasion of Android Tablets, Nokia’s Microsoft dilemma or the iPad 2, one trend appears to be occurring quietly: the evolution from the touch screen to the “draw screen”! Can you imagine the ease with which one could doodle away, using apps like AutoDesk’s “Sketch”, preferably on a 10-inch Tablet PC?

One manufacturer is currently making a gutsy move of turning the Tablet PC into a canvas for a digital pen: HTC. The company just entered the Tablet market with a bang, introducing something rather unexpected to the competition, where everything else just seems to revolve around what version of Android one should release their Tablet with. At MWC 2011, the handset maker showed off his new device called “Flyer”, a 7-inch Tablet PC with a pressure-sensitive touchscreen that communicates with a stylus pen!

Apparently, the pen is an active unit, unlike other digitizers. That means the device doesn’t need to be pressed hard to follow your command, the resulting user experience is supposedly very smooth.

Now, I thought that touch screen was all about one-finger usage, and so did all the makers of operating systems for tablets. Result: Android, for example, does not natively support a pen device – which is why HTC, in addition to his refreshed version of its UI called “Sense”, included a technology called “Scribe”.

It allows for HTC’s Tablet to take full advantage of the digital pen for all sorts of usages and applications, such as “Notes”, a software specifically for stylus use, where one can can paste and annotate photos and text and then sync them to Evernote. The stylus is pressure sensitive and allows for sketching and handwriting recognition. HTC’s Tablet will be released in Q2 of 2011 and will be running Android Honeycomb.

Another option

While HTC might be on to something, a company called Nomad Brush has brought a different approach to the digital pen idea: a brush that looks and handles exactly like a real brush, but works on the iPad and other Tablet Pcs.

The brush actually sports bristels and apparently allows for a true painting experience, using Apps like Artrage, Brushes, Auryn Ink and Zen Brush. The brush can be purchased now on the company’s website for $24.00 and currently only ships to the US and Canada.

Last but not least: the Irony. Nomade’s brush does NOT work with Wacom tablets!

The new model is rumoured to be thinner, lighter and will sport a front-and rear facing camera, while the screen resolution remains the same as the current model. The device will be supposedly be powered by a multi-core Cortex A9 processor, have more memory and a built-in SD card slot. As far as the form factor goes: not much of change there – which I believe is a good thing.

The price point of the new device will be the same as the current model and it is going the arrive on AT&T and Verizon simultaneously in Q2 of 2011.

When the iPad hits the market, it will find itself in a slightly different setting than the first model and is likely to compete against Motorola, Samsung, HP and Palm where it had previously single-handedly dominated the market – well, actually created and defined it

Update:
Finally, Dell did not give away more details in the Windows Tablet. However, CNET was able to snap the below picture of what looks like a “Tablet Dummy”.

Source: CNET

To date, Samsung’s Galaxy tab appears to be the most real offering of an Android-based Tablet PC product. While the CES 2011 back in January  was seeing a ton of ambitious new tablet product announcements, the Galaxy Tab has been available for purchase since November 2010. The Tablet is in fact largely responsible for the 22% market share of android based tablet computers. The other 78 % go to, well, Apple with its OS on the iPad.

The 7-inch tablet fits surprisingly well in a small hand and lends itself perfectly for one-handed use.

Since its release, Samsung has been seeing quite some consumer interest (depends on who you are asking) and sales have been “quite smooth” not “quite small” according to some company execs. In fact, the company has sold more than 2 million Galaxy Tabs since launch, the return rate has been a whopping 13%-16%, despite great reviews. One of the reasons for that could be that the rumours are already swirling on the end-of-year release of the “Galaxy Tablet 2″. It is now official that the company will be announcing the new device at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on February 13th 2011.

For those who don’t care about the potentially better product of the future – much like anybody still buying iPads, while the new iPad 2 is a sure thing to hit the stores in about 2moths – here comes our own review of the Galaxy Tab.

Hardware

At the heart of the device is a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor with 512 MB RAM and powerful SGX540 GPU. With 16 GB internal storage and a maximum of 32 GB additionally available on MicroSD, you’re definitely in for some great multimedia experience.

At first glance, the device has a fairly rugged, but not heavy feel to it. The South Korean manufacturer for consumer electronics certainly displays great skill at making gadgets desirable without totally emulating the competition. The 7-inch tablet fits surprisingly well in a small hand and lends itself perfectly  for one-handed use.

The screen (Gorilla Glass!) is framed with a black bezel and contributes to the device’s overall “clean” look and feel. The LCD screen has a resolution of 1024 x 600, a bit less than the iPad (1024 x 768 IPS). The viewing angles seem great, we can tilt the device with no noticeable image or color distortion. Hello family trips!

It sports 4 touch buttons on its front side, a headphone jack on the top and a volume controller, microSD card slot, power button on the right edge and a proprietary charger with speakers on the bottom. The speakers will not instantly make you the DJ at any party but you still have a shot by connecting the tablet to external speakers. There is no MicroUSB port that could be used for charging the device, it probably wouldn’t provide enough power to sufficiently charge the Galaxy Tab.

One of the impressive features of the Galaxy Tab is that it can be used as a 3G Hot Spot and will provide wifi for up to 5 devices! Imagine you are stuck at a hotel where you need your laptop and your smart phone to feed of the same network. Neat!

The Tablet comes with a dual camera setup: The 1.3-megapixel front facing cam and the one on the back with a 3 Megapixel resolution and LED flash. This is where the Galaxy Tab strikes it big against the iPad – that is, until the iPad 2 comes out.

The rear camera does a decent job as a casual replacement for your point-and-shoot and the flash does a good job in a poorly lit alley. People around you might be looking at you funny when you pull out an oversizes pocket camera though.

It also shoots video, unfortunately not in HD but in 720×480, with no stuttering problems. The setup is generally perfect for video chats rather than filming the next blockbuster flick.

Camera Setup Screen

The keyboard stretches across the 7 Inches of screen real-estate and takes some getting used to. You might at first find the keys too short and wide at first, especially if you are coming from a portrait-mode keyboard on a different device.The good news: the Galaxy Tab supports Bluetooth keyboards and includes a keyboard dock.

On-Screen Keyboard

Software

The Galaxy Tab comes preloaded with Android 2.2 and support for Flash Player 10.1. I won’t have to outline in detail what advantage that means over the hardware coming out of Cupertino.
The so called “TouchWiz” user interface adapts well to the Tab and looks the same as the Galaxy S with the addition of extra real-estate that prevents you fingers from accidentally loading the wrong application.

As with any other device in competitive markets, the product lives and dies with its applications. Apple clearly set the standard with its app store and keeps marching ahead of the crowd.
However, Samsung already provides a variety of native apps for the device and developers have taken to adapting the yet 4-inch-optimized Android applications to a 7-inch screen in favour of a better user experience on the Galaxy Tab. The efforts are already paying of in form of multiple applications like Contacts, Calendar, and Memo that display 2 panes of information.Your email for example can be viewed in a 2 column layout and makes everything appear more organized. Putting the Tab in landscape mode enhances the experience.

Bottom Line

The Samsung Galaxy Tab plays in a league of its own. While sitting between a smartphone and 1o-inch tablet, the 7-inch Galaxy Tab delivers a sound Android experience and is one of the first commercial uses of Google’s mobile operating system. The device feels solid and mature and offers a swiss-knife experience for the most part. The fact that it is offered by the 4 big U.S. carriers shows that Samsung has done something right and continues to be a force to be reckoned with.

And what a feisty little bugger it is: Armed with everything a future tablet pc owner can wish for, from a front-facing webcam to an SD card reader and 2 USB ports, the device also sports 2GB of RAM, processing speed of 1.66 GHz, and 32GB or 64GB of storage to choose from. The VIBE is powered by an Intel Atom N450 processor, and claims to offer 4 hrs of battery life.

Named after the company, the ExoPC OS offers its own development kit and apparently makes it easy to adapt mobile applications to work within the Expo environment.
To make the offering even more attractive and complete , ExoPC will have its own app store with an estimated 1000 applications available by the end of 2010.

The company is expected to start shipping their tablet pc this week and pre-orders are going to 1.100 customers in 34 countries. Find out more here: http://www.exopc.com/