Take two tablets before bed…

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 Chris Churilo, VP Product Management & User Experience

…And you should feel better in the morning. The tablet party of CES is lingering like a hangover… seriously, is CTIA 2011 a repeat of CES and MWC 2011?

The largest booths here are all from the device manufacturers showing off their tablets. Perhaps I am being a little cruel because there are some new ones that are worth mentioning, but it is not as exciting as seeing the tablets for the first time.

HTC has a new tablet that has a stylus!?! The guy at the booth kept reminding me that it wasn’t a stylus but a digital pen. Whatever. I would lose it no matter what you call it. During his demo, he recorded his voice once when he was taking notes and once again when he was drawing… why would I do that? That didn’t really impress me.

What was impressive, is the Wi-Fi-only option and the “HTC experience” is pretty nice. I did notice that the specs called out that this device sits on Android 2.4 – so is this a tablet or a big phone?

Samsung had new devices which were great to see – the 10 inch is what I expected from them, and the smaller 8.9 inch Wi-Fi-only device is a good size. Running on Honeycomb, with bright graphics – not bad, not bad.

And finally, another 8.9 inch tablet that caught my eye was the LG G-Slate. Another Honeycomb device with a great display and a good feel to it. It also has a 3D display, which doesn’t do much for me. My colleagues tell me that their kids love 3D but are they the target audience for these devices? I doubt it, but if you disregard the 3D display, this one could be a popular model.

Tags: Samsung, tablet