Tablet Computers: It’s All About the Apps (cont.)

Because tablets are a new business and a handful of brands have the biggest slice of the market, it’s unlikely that many of the lesser players—and considering what happened to Hewlett-Packard, even a few well-known brands—will be in the tablet business for long. So any bare-bones tablet that you buy today could be an orphan in terms of service and support tomorrow.

FUTURE LOOK. One new tablet vendor might shake up the current market: Amazon. The online bookstore behemoth unveiled its tablet in September. The Kindle Fire ($199) is a hybrid model, like the Barnes & Noble Nook Color ($249), rather than a device that’s similar to the iPad or a full-size Android-based tablet. The Kindle Fire combines e-book-reader functions and tablet capabilities, including Web browsing, games, and movie and music playback. Like the Nook Color, it uses the Android operating system and has a 7-inch LCD touchscreen rather than an e-ink screen, which is the low-power electronic display that most e-book readers use. (Editor’s Note: Because the Kindle Fire isn’t scheduled to be released until November, it wasn’t evaluated for Best Buy consideration.)

However, tablet prices are unlikely to drop dramatically in the short term, but you can expect more technology for your money, such as faster, more-powerful processors, marginal improvements to the manufacturers’ stated 7–10 hours of battery life that tablets now supply, slightly higher screen resolution and higher resolution cameras.

Innovative designs are emerging, too. Already on the way is Sony’s Tablet P, which at press time was due this fall. (No price has been announced.) It’s a clamshell/foldable model that has dual screens that allow you to run different apps on each screen or one app across both. Also scheduled for release this fall was the Asus Eee Slider SL101 ($479 for its 16GB version). The top (screen) slides across and up to create a stand, revealing a slide-out keyboard.

And Apple’s iPad 3 is rumored to be available next spring. According to reports, the iPad 3 will have the higher resolution display that the iPhone has and a faster processor. It also might be positioned as a higher priced “professional” tablet model rather than as an update to the iPad 2.

But even models that arrive in the next year still won’t have the same capacity for heavy-duty gaming, serious programming or storage of many large files that a typical notebook computer does. Will they do enough to become the only computer in your life? The answer, of course, depends on your answer to the question of why you want a tablet.

Stewart Wolpin has reported on consumer electronics for 27 years and is a frequent contributor to Consumers Digest.