Apple rivals gear up to share success of iPad

IT may be just nine months since iPad was unleashed on the world amid huge fanfare, but already Apple’s revolutionary product is facing stiff competition from its rivals.

Samsung, Motorola and Toshiba are all unveiling their versions of the tablet computer and now, with the unveiling of the somewhat childishly named Playbook, BlackBerry is adding fuel to the already fiery competition between itself and Apple.

In advance of this week’s launch at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, experts were giving the Playbook the edge on portability, its camera specification, and processing capabilities.

Apple reigned supreme for display, connectivity and — unsurprisingly, given its dominance in the phone arena — applications.

While questions have been raised over the BlackBerry’s battery life, nonetheless, its product is still seen as one of two real contenders to Apple’s dominance in the area.

In particular, experts at the Consumer Electronics Show were impressed by the way it lets users run several applications at the same time without having to pause any of them, and with its high-speed performance.

The BlackBerry Playbook, which is smaller than the iPad and less than a centimetre thick, will be released in the US in March and will reach Europe in the summer. It will be hoping for the same level of interest which has seen more than 7.5 million iPads sold since its launch last April.

The other mainstream competition to Apple is Motorola’s Xoom. At 10.1 inches it has a bigger screen than the Playbook (7in) and the iPad (9.7in) and that screen can show full HD video playback. It will also have a rear and a front facing camera for making video calls.

A noteable absentee from the big names rolling out tablets is Microsoft and, at the world-renowned trade show this week, all it produced were bits of a computer which could eventually make up its finished offering.

The other star of the show in Las Vegas is Google’s Android technology, which is used in every new 4G smartphone and tablet announced by the four major carriers at the showcase event and which makes the phones and tablets operate much more like a home computer.

For example, Motorola’s Atrix 4G phone can dock to a monitor or laptop shell to become a desktop computer running a modified version of Android.

Motorola claims that, thanks to its dual core 1GHz + 1GHz processor, the new phone can open web pages “twice as fast as most other smartphones”.

In spite of the competition in the tablet and smartphone arena being unveiled at the International Consumer Electronics Show, Apple has stuck with its position of not attending trade shows such as this week’s Las Vegas event.