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One of the most dis­cussed trends at CES 2010 was the Tablet PC.

Every sin­gle hard­ware man­u­fac­turer I have met there has announced or will announce a Tablet PC in the near future.

From an indus­try point of view, tablets are not new to the mar­ket. They have been sit­ting there for such a long time with very low mar­ket suc­cess due to sev­eral fac­tors. First of all they have always been expen­sive, bulky, almost unus­able a with a very very small bat­tery life.

Apple is rumored to announce a tablet PC by the end of Jan­u­ary, and yes­ter­day a France Telecom/​Orange told the inter­viewer that this may be a real­ity for their cus­tomers (Read and watch a video on this on Techcrunch).

For the very first time the whole indus­try has not reacted to a prod­uct release but to a rumor. It would be very funny to hear Steve Jobs say­ing: “One last thing… I am sure that you heard about Apple releas­ing a tablet PC, well, we were kidding.”.

It seems that the whole indus­try does not want to go through the pain they suf­fered from iPhone announce­ments in the past. They want to be ready for what­ever the Apple tablet will be. I hope they will be able to.

Ok, this is inter­pre­ta­tion that is more close to sci-​fi than to a real busi­ness case.

The real thing is that now the tech­nol­ogy is there for this kind of products.

In the first place there are faster enough chipset out there to make good prod­ucts and make full use of big dis­plays. We can now design slim and light tablets com­pared to what we were able to do in the past. A huge vari­ety of local area con­nec­tiv­ity and wide area con­nec­tiv­ity is avail­able from the same chipset. Bat­tery life can be brought to a sat­is­fy­ing level up to 10 – 12 hours and the price may be low enough to com­pete in the con­sumer space.

Last but not least, Oper­at­ing Sys­tems. There is a huge choice of oper­at­ing sys­tems avail­able for use with this kind of devices. Win­dows Mobile, Android, Linux and so many other. Proces­sors are fast enough to cope with the needs of these guys.

Android seems to be the pre­ferred choice of most of the com­pa­nies out there. It seems a good choice to me even if I think that Google may want to push Chrome OS for these devices. Unfor­tu­nately we will not be able to see Chrome OS before Q4 next year, maybe a lit­tle bit early and that’s too far for a prod­uct that a ven­dor may be will­ing to release now.

It is quite clear to every­body that the suc­cess of this prod­uct will not be hard­ware, but soft­ware, user expe­ri­ence and usabil­ity. None of those oper­at­ing sys­tems are at the same level in this regard as shown by Apple on the iPhone. There is a lot of work to do.

The sty­lus is def­i­nitely dead. This is a mat­ter of fact. If you look at the iPhone it is quite clear that the abil­ity to use the device with your fin­gers, and in a very effec­tive way, is key to the device suc­cess. For the time being there is no one out there, apart from Apple, that has been able to deliver such usabil­ity at the same level of refinement.

I think that releas­ing such a prod­uct with­out a good and usable oper­at­ing sys­tem and a great ser­vice propo­si­tion, what­ever it will be (e.g. mul­ti­me­dia con­tent, e-​books), is going to be a failure.

It is quite clear to every­body that Apple has great usabil­ity, great con­tent in iTunes and seems per­fectly fit to make a suc­cess out of this prod­ucts. For all of the oth­ers it will be the old usual catch up.

If you want to have an idea of what was announced at CES 2010 in Las Vegas the guys at dig​i​tal​trends​.com have come out with a fan­tas­tic post on the subject.

The photo in this post if from nDev­ilTV.

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2. Apple iPhone And The Yet To Be Announced Google Phone
3. iPhone spec­u­la­tions
4. Apple Warns Hack­ing iPhone May Harm It
5. iPhone Sight­ings