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Google's signature browser finally makes its debut on the Android OS. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

Android is finally getting Chromed out.

Google launched a beta version of Chrome for Android smartphones and tablets Tuesday, delivering a mobile version of the popular desktop web browser after a very long wait. Indeed, both Android and Chrome launched more than three years ago, and users have demanded unification ever since.

Why bemoan the long wait? Much like the company’s other products and services, the new Chrome app hooks wonderfully into the Google universe, giving those immersed in desktop Google apps even more incentive to choose Android as their mobile OS. So, naturally, we would hope — nay, expect — that Chrome would be the default browser for the Android OS.

But this hasn’t been the case. Android users have been forced to use a generic, stock browser (unceremoniously named “Browser”) that’s inferior to not only Chrome, but also other browsers available in the Android Market. Dolphin, anyone?

Google had a reason to take its time: It wanted to do Chrome for Android right.

“We didn’t want to just push out Chrome light,” said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Google Chrome, in an interview. “Our goal was to get all of Chrome onto Android.”

Which is exactly what Pichai and his team did. It’s a full version of the Chrome browser for Android, still performing as adroitly as ever without losing the features that come in the desktop version.

There are clear perks in using Chrome instead of other Android browsers. If you’re already a desktop Chrome user, your bookmarks will be synced across all your browser versions after signing into your Google account. Even cooler, if you’ve left pages open on your laptop at home, you can access those same open tabs from your mobile Chrome browser. Search terms you’ve entered on your desktop browser also carry over to Chrome for Android, saving precious time and screen tapping.

But most important of all, Chrome is fast. Really freaking fast. When typing in an address into the search bar, for instance, Chrome predicts what page you’re going to visit and starts loading it in the browser background. So by the time you’ve clicked “go,” most of the site has already loaded.

To be sure, the Chrome browser itself is nothing new. It’s been around since 2008, when Google first decided to take on Microsoft, Mozilla and others by casting its lot in the browser wars. The move proved to be a smart one: For nearly the past year and a half, Chrome has slowly increased market share, according to various browser analytics firms’ estimates.

In fact, Chrome actually surpassed Firefox, once the most popular alternative to the dominant Internet Explorer (which still holds about 50 percent of desktop browser share). After Tuesday’s debut for Android devices — of which there are more than 700,000 activations daily — Chrome’s adoption numbers will only escalate.

But the Chrome release raises a number of questions about the new browser app, and the relationship that the Android and Chrome teams have with one another. When the Chrome team first announced it was creating a Chrome-based operating system — later to be known as Chrome OS — it was difficult to resolve how the software wouldn’t come into conflict with Android. After all, Android is the premier operating system for all things mobile (smartphones, tablets). Except, that is, for Google’s version of the netbook: the Chromebook. So the question is, Which OS owns what? Is it Chrome for netbooks, and Android for everything else?

Pichai thinks there’s room enough for both operating systems. The Chrome OS, he says, can be seen “as a different computing paradigm.” It’s one that, “end-to-end, is fully based on the web.”

“Native mobile applications are thriving, but web apps are going to thrive as well,” Pichai said.

While it’s nice to see the two camps playing nicely in Tuesday’s release, it’s not without a caveat. As of Tuesday’s launch, Chrome for Android is only available for smartphones and tablets running Android version 4.0 (a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich). At this point, this includes just a handful of phones and tablets. And of course, it’s Chrome “beta” for Android, so don’t expect everything to work perfectly.

Still, Pichai is confident the Chrome team will drop the “beta” title sooner rather than later. “After announcing Chrome the first time, we took it out of beta in three months,” Pichai said. “I’d expect this to happen here in the near future.” And as it stands, after Chrome moves out of beta, the plan is for Chrome to take the place of Android’s default browser permanently.

If you’ve got Ice Cream Sandwich, head to the Android Market to download the app right now.

Tabbed browsing — another perk of going Chrome. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

Source:wired.com

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Remember the head-tracking app that would let the iPad fake a pretty convincing 3-D display? Well, now you can try it out for yourself — free — instead of just watching a video of other people using it. The developers, from the University of Joseph Fourier in France, have released the app on the App Store. Read More…

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Intel’s quick response to a chip flaw illustrates how much is at stake in the rollout of a new CPU.

Codenamed “Cougar Point,” the flawed chip is part of the chipset supporting Intel’s second generation Core series of processors, codenamed “Sandy Bridge,” which were released in early January. Intel announced yesterday that it had discovered a design flaw in the chip and immediately halted shipments of the affected products. Read More…

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Intel’s quick response to a chip flaw illustrates how much is at stake in the rollout of a new CPU.

Codenamed “Cougar Point,” the flawed chip is part of the chipset supporting Intel’s second generation Core series of processors, codenamed “Sandy Bridge,” which were released in early January. Intel announced yesterday that it had discovered a design flaw in the chip and immediately halted shipments of the affected products. Read More…

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LAS VEGAS — Every year at CES, there’s a theme or expectation that quickly becomes codified the moment you step inside the cavernous and often soulless Las Vegas Convention Center. This year, it was clear that everyone and their grandmother was coming out with a tablet PC. Pre-show estimates put the number around 50. Scuttlebutt inside Central Hall here put that figure closer to 80, although an exact count would be a near-Herculean and mind-numbing task.

What is painfully obvious is that many of these tablet makers showing off their wares will be drubbed by giants like Apple, Samsung, Motorola, RIM, and maybe a couple other fortunate ones. For the rest, 2011 is looking to be a gruesome battle of attribution amongst dozens of other companies.

“The market will only bear so much,” said IDC analyst David Daoud before CES kicked off. “It’s going to get pretty ugly as the year goes on.”

And with so many options out there to pick from, it’s going to be up to the manufacturers to separate themselves with unique features, although some are banking on being the budget-priced model of choice for those looking to spend under $500 on an entry-level tablet. Let’s look at show some of the major players of 2011 might be.

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Erik is the editor of Playbook, Wired.com’s sports blog. He’s also the managing editor of Longshot and a contributor to Pop-Up Magazine.
Follow @erikmal and @wiredplaybook on Twitter.

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The Gadget Lab crew kicks off this week’s podcast with a look at Dylan Tweney’s ugly new kicks, a pair of surf shoes made of recycled soda bottles. They cost $70. Seriously.

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Moving on from cheesy hippy apparel, Brian X. Chen shares the news of an upcoming Apple press conference, where we can expect new iPods, a major iTunes upgrade (streaming!) and maybe a do-over of the Apple TV.

Apple’s competitors haven’t been so quiet, either. A “leaked” video emerged this week demonstrating Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, a 7-inch, Android-powered touchscreen tablet that looks to be a worthy rival to Apple’s iPad.

Speaking of the iPad Tweney shares a hack for his iPad to gain 3G service at no additional cost with the help of his iPhone. If you jailbreak your iPhone at the site JailbreakMe.com, you can download an app called MyWi to turn the iPhone into a wireless hot spot. Select the hot spot on your iPad et voila 3G-surfing privileges on the tablet without any monthly bills. That’s sweet.

Still, it’s too bad 3G coverage in general is spotty at best (especially here in San Francisco). Dissatisfied customers are in luck: We’ve heard Sprint may give you a free femtocell to boost your service if it’s proving unreliable. Also, an unhappy AT&T customer on Wired.com staff complained loudly enough to score a free femtocell to fix the crappy reception on his iPhone. Who said whining doesn’t pay off?

Like the show? You can also get theGadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you dont want to be distracted by our smiling faces, check out theGadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Labvideo oraudio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #86

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Chinese gadgeteers Giz-China have tested out the $220 ePad, an Android tablet which is clearly “inspired” by the iPad. The verdict of the head-to-head test, it won’t surprise you to learn, is that the tablet is a piece of junk. This is despite the review’s author, Andi, curiously declaring the ePad the winner.

The ePad looks a lot like the iPad, but then the similarities end. The cheap tablet has a plastic back, good for letting through radio-waves and being lightweight, bad for stiffness and strength. Around the sides you see arrayed a laundry-list of ports “missing” from the iPad: microSD card-reader, a USB-port, HDMI port along with a front-facing camera. You also get Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Then we get to the screen. Here’s what Andi says: “Where as the iPads true touch screen offers crisp vibrant colours, the ePad looks dull and washed out [...] The ePad has a terrible screen in comparison.” The ePad uses a resistive touch-screen, the kind you have to push hard to register a click. It is designed to work with a stylus but “Take away that stylus and youve got a very stubborn little tablet.”

Onto the OS. Andi declares this round a tie, despite admitting that “Each time I have used an Android device [...] Im always left underwhelmed,” and that iOS is “is very simple and quick to use/learn to use.” He even works in another dig at that awful screen.

What about the rest of the hardware, the 1GHz ARM A8 that powers the ePad? It managed to surf the web but after that it would “play choppy video clips and crash when we attempted to open a racing game that looked like it had come from a Commodore 64!! It then refused to do anything before it had had been given a complete hard reset!”

Oh dear. It seems that throwing a tablet together isn’t quite as easy as it might seem. Like a million tiny netbooks before it, the ePad might seem like a cheap bargain on paper, but when you use one, you find you have just wasted a few hundred dollars.

Exclusive: Hands On With The ePad Android Tablet [Giz-China]

Photos: Giz-China

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Surveys reveal that a substantial chunk of U.S. customers plan to buy a tablet in the next year, and it’s not necessarily going to be an iPad.

Fourteen percent, or 27 million U.S. online consumers, intend to buy some kind of tablet in the next 12 months, says a Forrester research report (.pdf) published Thursday (chart below). Customers interested in purchasing a tablet aren’t primarily Apple customers, and they’re well aware of the crop of upcoming tablets from competitors such as Google and Hewlett-Packard.

Additionally, a similar study by the Magazine Publishers of America found that nearly 60 percent of U.S. consumers expect to purchase an e-reader or tablet within the next three years.

“Even though the iPad is the only widely available tablet PC on the market today, tablets have entered consumer consciousness in a very short time frame,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a consumer product analyst at Forrester. “Theres interest in the category that goes beyond the iPad.”

Apple’s four-month-old iPad is turning in strong sales with 3.27 million units sold to date just a hair short of Macs, which sold 3.47 million unitsin the same quarter. That’s a huge accomplishment for a device less than a year old, and it delivered a shot of adrenaline to the mostly moribund tablet market. For years, scores of tablets have come and gone from manufacturers such as HP, Acer and even Apple, whose first tablet offering was the Newton. The Newton, like most other tablet devices during its time, was criticized for poor handwriting recognition and priceyness ($700 to $1,000), and was retired by 1998. In the meantime, dozens of PC manufacturers have shipped Windows-based Tablet PCs, but the category never took off outside of niche markets and enthusiasts.

Even though most of the tablet hype today surrounds the iPad, many respondents to Forrester’s survey said they were aware of other offerings on the horizon, such as the unreleased HP Slate, as well as obscure tablets like the Archos and JooJoo.The general widespread interest in the tablet category gives hope to manufacturers preparing to compete with Apple, Forrester said.

Forrester’s study also found that today’s customers tend to live with many connected devices. 69 percent of iPad buyers and 57 percent of tablet buyers also own a latest-generation game console (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii) compared with 37 percent of all U.S. online consumers.

Notably, iPad fans aren’t necessarily Apple worshippers (chart below): More iPad customers own HP computers than Macs. 39 percent of respondents who said they own or intend to buy an iPad said they own an HP computer, for example. iPad owners are also four times more likely to own a connected TV (9 percent versus 2 percent of non-iPad-owning U.S. online customers).

Apple has a head start on the new tablet market with its iPad, but competitors are just beginning to roll in. Dell recently introduced its 5-inch Streak tablet, which is getting some positive reception. And most recently, the tech sphere has been buzzing with rumors of a Google-powered tablet working on the Verizon network, possibly landing as soon as the holiday season (though we’re skeptical).

Forrester report (.pdf)

Source:wired.com

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A Wacom-style graphics tablet for the Wii? It’s a fantastic idea, and if THQ, the maker of the uDraw, can make it work as well as a Wacom, it could have a winning peripheral.

The tablet, officially a “GameTablet”, has a slot onto which you slide the Wiimote, and this allows it to communicate with the console and also powers the tablet. The pen is tethered (a good thing, otherwise the kids would lose it in five seconds), and lets you draw on a 9 x 7-inch panel.

The uDraw will cost $70 and will ship with a game called uDraw Studio, a painting app which also uses some of the Wiimote’s buttons as controls: hit the minus-button to undo a brush-stroke, for example. It all looks worthily educational, and has the bonus that you won’t have to clutter the beautiful door of your SMEG refrigerator with the paper detritus of your kids’ scribbling sessions.

THQ has some more titles on the way already. A draw-along platformer called “Dood’s Big Adventure” (which sounds awful) and a version of Pictionary, which could be a genius move from THQ.

The uDraw will ship at the end of this year, almost certainly in time for Christmas. The games will follow, for $30 apiece, in 2011.

uDraw [Wonderful World of uDraw via Yahoo]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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At this point, you probably know a lot about the new Kindle. But it’s this little hardware addition on the underside of the device that’s caught our attention:

What’s that in the middle? Why, yes — it’s a microphone!

According to the new Kindle User’s Guide, the microphone is not currently enabled but is provided for future use. Some folks think it’s for voice navigation, which could give Kindle a major accessibility advantage over its competitors. (E-readers and tablets still remain way behind PCs on this front.) David Rothman thinks Amazon/Sprint might stick a phone in there, which seems pretty unlikely given how intent Bezos and Amazon seem on refining the reading experience rather than competing with Apple and general-purpose tablets on all things multimedia.

But voice annotations and memos don’t seem too far-fetched; and if the apps developed using the Kindle Development Kit get off the ground sometime soon, I suppose the more hardware goodies third-parties have to play with, the better.

Andres Bastyn identified the microphone in a short roundup at TeleRead, “Unheralded new features in the Kindle 3,” focusing on subtle but sharp software tweaks. For instance, the web browser now has an “article view” mode, similar to the new Reader function in Safari or the popular iOS app Instapaper.

Likewise, PDF reading has been improved: the viewer now lets you highlight and copy-and-paste text, and adjust the contrast for better readability (a major problem in the past for scanned/photocopied docs). There are even workarounds for avoiding document delivery charges over 3G, by either syncing with your computer or sending your documents to an email address that waits until you’re in wi-fi to send them along. Saving bandwidth is saving money, especially if you’re not using it to buy something from Amazon.

All this points to Amazon trying to strengthen and reposition the Kindle as a general text document reader, not just a portal for e-books. And it makes it pretty unlikely that Amazon/Sprint would just drop a whole new data stream in there, even if they could try to introduce a new monthly fee — something that could make Kindle users, having been promised free 3G for the life of their devices, to totally lose it.

Photo credit: Amazon.com

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Back in May, we took a look at a ShutterSnitch, an iPad app that lets you receive photos wirelessly from your camera. Combined with an Eye-Fi wireless SD card, you can shoot away and have the photos pop up on the big screen in seconds. It’s like shooting tethered to a laptop, only about a zillion times more convenient.

So why are we revisiting the subject? Because it got a whole lot easier to use. Now, the tricky networking part has been simplified and you need only follow a few steps to get things up and running. The first time you do this, you’ll need to configure both the Eye-Fi card (using the Eye-Fi Center) if it is not already aware of your Wi-Fi network, and also the ShutterSnitch app (just enter the Eye-Fi username and password).

From there, you simply need to shoot, with one weird caveat: you need to create a “collection” in ShutterSnitch to receive the photos. That’s it. Now you can beam the photos across as you shoot.

There are plenty of things you can do within the application. As you shoot, the images are shown full-screen, with or without shutter-speed, aperture and histogram overlays. Once done, you can keep the photos in ShutterSnitch, mail them, organize them, upload to Flickr and pass them off to the iPad’s own photo-library, from where it can be sent off to any other photo-editing application you might have.

There is one big gotcha. You’ll need to have a Wi-Fi network running to make this all work: The Eye-Fi cannot beam direct to the iPad. That means you’ll need either a portable hotspot like the MiFi, be in a place where there is already a network, or create one using a laptop (which kind of defeats the point of this). I’m going to pick up an Eye-Fi card this afternoon and also investigate jailbreak solutions for ad-hoc network creation on the iPad. If it works, I’ll let you know.

From Eye-Fi to iPad [Eye-Fi blog]

Eye-Fi Card, iPad, and ShutterSnitch for Wireless Transfer [The Digital Story]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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In this week’s Gadget Lab video podcast, Brian X. Chen and Priya Ganapati touch on more wireless woes reported by iPhone users. Apparently in some cities the iPhone’s upload speeds were slowing down to a crawl. AT&T has responded and said the drop was due to a software bug that will be addressed but not before angry conspiracy-theorist customers accused the telecom company of purposely capping speeds for the device.

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In brighter news, Ganapati shares her hands-on experience with the Dell Streak, a 5-inch touchscreen tablet device that feels like a supersized smartphone. Perhaps this Dell is aiming to offer a tablet that will actually fit in a woman’s purse unlike the iPad?

And looking further in the future, Chen talks about recent credible rumors that the Apple TV may be getting a software overhaul to run iOS, the same operating system that powers iPhones and iPads. Such a change would pose interesting implications for videogames, TV apps and more.

Like the show? You can also get theGadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you dont want to be distracted by our mugs, check out theGadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Labvideo or audio podcast feeds.

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A growing chorus of voices argue that the internet is making us dumber. Web-connected laptops, smartphones and videogame consoles have all been cast as distracting brain mushers. But there’s reason to believe some of the newest devices might not erode our minds. In fact, some scientists think they could even make us smarter.

Could the cleaner and more modern interfaces that we see on iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones better suit the way our minds were meant to work?

While doing research for my upcoming technoculture book titledAlways On, I posed the question to Muhammet Demirbilek, an assistant professor of educational technology at Suleyman Demirel University, whose findings suggest newer mobile interfaces could foster focus and improve our ability to learn.

“The interface of [the] iPad could work well for us,” Demirbilek told me. “We use our hands instead of a keyboard or mouse, and it fits exactly how we behave and think in real life. In addition, the iPad interface looks easier for us, because it has larger-size text and bigger icons. It is less likely to cause cognitive overload to the user, based on my studies.”

This idea challenges the conclusions of web cynics like Nicholas Carr. In his new book,The Shallows, Carr draws on a plethora of studies that collectively conclude theinternet is shattering our focus and rewiring our brains to make us shallower thinkers.However, these arguments may not apply to the newest wave of devices.

Though scientists haven’t had a chance to study the implications of the cleaner and more modern interfaces that we see on iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones, we can draw some inferences from previous studies on computer interface and brain activity.

In 2004, Demirbilek conducted a study on 150 students at the University of Florida to examine the effects of different computer windows interfaces on learning. He compared two interfaces — a tiled-windows interface, in which windows were displayed next to each other in their entirety, versus an overlapping-windows interface, in which windows were laid on top of each other like a spread-out stack of paper.

Inside a computer lab, the participants were split into two groups randomly assigned to work with the tiled-windows interface mode or the overlapping-windows mode. Each mode contained a multimedia learning environment requiring the students to complete certain tasks. Demirbilek measured the students’ disorientation — how likely they were to get lost in a document, and their cognitive load — the total amount of mental activity being taxed in the working memory.

To measure disorientation, each student’s Internet Explorer history file recorded the number of informational “nodes” that were accessed to complete each task — in other words, the number of steps each user took before finishing an activity. For each task, a user was deemed either oriented or completely lost based on the number of nodes accessed.

To measure cognitive load, the students were timed on how long they took to react to different interactions. For instance, in one part of the study, the participants were required to click a button as soon as the background color of a window changed.

After completing his study, Demirbilek found that subjects using the tiled-windows interface were significantly less disoriented than subjects using an overlapping-windows interface. He also found that participants working with overlapping windows were substantially more likely to experience cognitive overload than those working with tiled windows.

In conclusion, students using the tiled-windows interface were able to find specific information more easily and engage with it more deeply, whereas students working with overlapping windows struggled to see how parts of a knowledge base were related, and they often omitted large pieces of information. Students using the tiled-windows interface were able to learn considerably better than those working with overlapping windows.

“The tiled-windows interface treatment provided help to users, enabling them to efficiently communicate with the hypermedia learning environment,” Demirbilek wrote in his research paper.

Demirbilek’s conclusions don’t contradict Carr’s assertions, but they suggest that the gap where information is lost between short-term memory and long term-memory is not due solely to hyperlinking, but also to the disorienting nature of the interface used. Carr is correct that the traditional PC computing environment (such as Windows or Mac OS X), which uses an overlapping-windows interface, is conducive to shallower learning.

However, Carr’s cited studies focus on interfaces that will soon be out-of-date. Newer mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones abolish the traditional graphical user interface we’re accustomed to. Gone are the mouse pointer and the mess of windows cluttering our desktop. On these mobile technologies especially the iPad with its bigger 9.7-inch display all the emphasis is placed on the content, and each launched app completely takes over the screen. The only pointers are our fingers. And going forward, we can expect future tablet computers competing with the iPad to replicate the single-screen interface.

Additionally, as touchscreen tablet computer users continue to grow, more web developers will feel pressured to scrap the busy website interfaces we’re accustomed to today. The drab, cluttered websites with squint-inducing boxes will be refreshed with large, touchable icons. Demirbilek and I agree that the iPad-driven tablet revolution is poised to improve user orientation and learning.

Of course, the iPad is less than a year old, and it has some work to do. By only displaying one app or one piece of content at a time, the iPad solves one problem while creating another.

A 1999 experiment on windows interfaces conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that fourth-grade students using multiple windows were able to answer quiz questions more quickly and score significantly higher than students working with a single window.

In conclusion, they found that multiple windows, displayed in their entirety, assisted in completing tasks where more than one source of information is needed to solve a problem.

The iPad’s single-screen interface reduces elements of distraction and potentially enhances user orientation, but because of the lack of windows, it also eliminates the ability to read information from multiple sources simultaneously on a single screen to complete more complex tasks.This shortcoming is what makes the iPad lacking as a productivity device for doing work. But problems like this can be solved over time with software updates.

And even though the iPad isn’t yet ideal for professionals, that’s just one audience for the device, Demirbilek said. He believes the iPad has already introduced an interface beneficial to learning, especially for children.

“I think that the interface of [the] iPad could work well for young children because it maps onto how kids already do things in their daily life,” he said. “Sweeping things across the screen fits exactly with how very young children behave and think.”
Brian X. Chen is author of a book about the always-connected mobile future titled Always On, publishing spring 2011 by Da Capo (Perseus Books Group).

Source:wired.com

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Intel’s attempt to get inside cellphones will take just a little bit longer.Though the company had hoped to get smartphones with Intel chips in the hands of consumers this year, it is likely that the first phones powered by Intel will debut early next year.

Mobile handsets featuring Intel processors are likely to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in January next year or at the Mobile World Congress conference in February.

“That would clearly be the window of opportunity for us,” Intel CTO Justin Rattner told Wired.com.

In May, Intel showed its new chip codenamed ‘Moorestown’ for mobile devices. The company said the chip would be extremely power efficient, while offering enough processing power for features such as video conferencing and HD video.

Though Intel’s chips power most desktops and notebooks, the company’s silicon is glaringly absent in the fast growing category of smartphones and tablets. Worldwide, companies shipped 54.7 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2010, up 56.7 percent from the same quarter a year ago, estimates IDC. Most talked about smartphones today from companies such as Motorola and HTC are powered by chips based on Intel rival ARM ’s architecture.

Intel has tried its hand in the phone-chip business earlier, with little success. In 2006, the company sold its XScale ARM-based division to Marvell. More recently, it tried to pitch its current generation of Atom processors to smartphone makers but the chips were not accepted because they consumed too much power for phone use.

‘Moorestown’ processors can beat the competition, says Intel. Rattner hopes the chips will also go beyond smartphones and into tablets.

So far, Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads in just three months since the product’s launch. Apple uses its own chip for the iPad.

Rattner says tablets using Intel chips are on their way and will be available to consumers by the end of the year.

“Almost all the tablets at Computex (a trade show for PC makers held in Taiwan every year) were Intel-based devices,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of interest and activity in the tablet space.”

Yet Rattner says he is “cautious” in his hopes for the tablet market. Rattner does not own an iPad but has an iPhone 3G S.

“A lot of people are saying that the tablet is the next netbook,” he says. “I am not so sure.” More than 85 million netbooks have been sold, since the devices became popular about three years ago.

Netbooks appealed to consumers because of their price, portability and their ability to offer a computing experience comparable to a notebook, say Rattner.

“With tablets, their utility remains to be seen,” he says. “The first generation of tablets including are missing some important things. The absence of a camera is especially baffling in the iPad.”

The iPad may have its flaws but for consumers it’s the only choice for now–unless you count the very flawed JooJoo.

Some tablet makers were waiting for ‘Moorestown’ chips but Intel has already started production and handing it to manufacturers, says Rattner.

“Apple’s gotten everyone’s attention and they have set that bar,” he says. “For others now coming to market, they have to have something substantially more capable than the iPad and it is going to take time to get there.”

Photo: (liewcf/Flickr)

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