Five of the Best Tablets Revealed So Far
We've seen numerous announcements of tablet computers in recent weeks, as the R&D labs of the world push out their hastily assembled attempts at competing with Apple's game-changing iPad. But are any of them up to the job?
Context & Ripple Effects
The tablet flood that Arm forecast back in March — over 50 new iPad-like devices shipping this year — is now arriving on reviewers' desks, and Gizmodo's roundup asks the question every one of those launches has been dodging: is any of them actually good? The wave is a direct response to Apple, which by early September had sold 3.2 million iPads inside an iOS install base of 120 million devices.
That scale is the real bar the five contenders have to clear. As the roundup notes, these are 'hastily assembled attempts' out of R&D labs racing to market, which suggests most were designed against the iPad's spec sheet rather than against six months of user behavior on a device that already exists at volume.
First-order effects
- Buyers considering a tablet this fall now have at least five announced alternatives to weigh directly against the iPad, whose 3.2 million units sold give Apple both manufacturing scale and a functioning app store on day one.
- Apple faces its first real review-cycle competition for the category it defined, with every comparison table in the press anchoring on the iPad as the default.
Second-order effects
- Chip suppliers stand to gain regardless of which slate wins: Arm's projection of 50-plus devices means silicon vendors collect design wins across the field even where individual tablets flop commercially.
- Rival makers are pushed to compete on price and hardware features they control, since none can match the iOS app catalog — a gap that pressures them toward open platforms and aggressive launch pricing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the tablet market splits structurally between an ecosystem-led incumbent and a long tail of commodity hardware running licensed software, echoing the dynamics of earlier post-iPod and post-iPhone markets.
- Review culture itself shifts: 'is it better than the iPad?' becomes the standing evaluation frame for the category, meaning challengers must clear a moving target refreshed annually rather than win on first-mover merit.
The trend: The post-iPad land grab is moving from announcement-stage vaporware to shipped products, with Arm-based hardware proliferating faster than any competitor can replicate Apple's software ecosystem.