CES 2011 Preview: Phones and Tablets
Dual-core and 4G phones will muscle their way to the fore at CES this year. — CES is traditionally the beginning of a busy season for cell phone and tablet announcements, but it's not the end of the story. With Mobile World Congress coming …
Context & Ripple Effects
CES has spent years growing into the industry's largest exhibitor floor, and the 2011 edition opens with mobile hardware at the center of the program: PC Magazine frames the show around dual-core and 4G phones plus a wave of tablet launches, and Agence France Presse's 'tablets galore' pickup signals how far the tablet angle traveled beyond the trade press.
The tablet push was already visible before the doors opened — days earlier, Smarthouse reported an HTC device positioned as a competitor to Apple's iSlate — and PC Magazine notes CES is only the first act, with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona set to continue the announcement run.
First-order effects
- Device makers led by HTC use CES 2011 to stake out tablet ground against Apple before Apple's own slate ships, while handset vendors put dual-core and 4G phones on carrier radars months ahead of their retail windows.
- Attendees and press get a split decision: buy into CES announcements or wait for the Mobile World Congress stage, which PC Magazine explicitly flags as continuing the same launch season.
Second-order effects
- Vendors face a forced choice of stage — front-load a CES reveal or save flagships for Barcelona — turning the January-to-February stretch into a two-show arms race for headlines and carrier mindshare.
- The tablet rush implied by the AFP framing pressures every major handset maker to field an answer to Apple's slate, multiplying component demand for dual-core silicon and 4G radios across the supply base.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, CES consolidates its role as the mobile industry's January showcase and the CES-plus-MWC pairing hardens into the fixed annual rhythm for phone and tablet launches.
- A crowded tablet field points toward a commoditized slate market structured around whoever controls the ecosystem layer — Apple versus an Android cohort led by HTC and peers — rather than hardware differentiation alone.
The trend: Mobile phones and tablets are displacing traditional gadget categories as CES's centerpiece, with the show anchoring a two-stage annual launch calendar alongside Mobile World Congress.