We haven’t seen any real tablet announcements in quite a bit of time, and I believe that’s mainly because the manufacturers are waiting to port ICS to their tablets. They know Honeycomb is a one year old OS, and has flopped in the market because it wasn’t fully baked, so it’s better to wait a few more months and deliver a tablet with Android 4.0 than one with Honeycomb.
Unfortunately for these manufacturers, the iPad 3 was also launched in the mean time, and it includes a pricey and not too available high-resolution display. This means that the manufacturers coming out with tablets now will have to significantly undercut the iPad on pricing. Even a $100 discount from the iPad’s price is probably not enough at this point for most of the new tablets.
If they want to show value, they will need to find a way to innovate, and impress people with features that the iPad doesn’t have, such as the integrated keyboard of the Asus Transformer Prime, including a very accurate stylus like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, or even experimenting with larger screen sizes, like Toshiba seems to be doing.
Toshiba is announcing 3 new tablets, one of 7.7″, which will probably become the new standard size for 7″ tablets (I think it’s a good idea), a 10″ one, and a big 13″ tablet. Now, I’ve been waiting for manufacturers to make bigger tablets for a while now. If they can experiment with smaller tablets, why can’t they experiment with larger ones?
I’m still not sure about a 13″ tablet until I see one in person, but I think it’s inexcusable for Toshiba to make such a large tablet without an integrated keyboard like the Transformer. Then at least it would make a bit of a sense. On its own, it might look silly to most people. On the other hand the Galaxy Note was also seen almost in the same way, and yet it was Samsung’s best selling device after the Galaxy S2 so far.
Whether it’s Asus, Toshiba, Samsung or someone else, I’d really like to see a 11.6″ tablet with an integrated keyboard like the Transformer Prime, but with tiny bezel like the Galaxy Tab 10.1. That way it won’t compromise too much on the tablet form factor, being only slightly larger, but it should offer a better experience in the laptop mode, because you’d also benefit from a larger keyboard, and as well a larger screen.