People who own tablet computers spend more time and money on the internet than anyone else in Britain. This is according to research commissioned by Total Media into how tablet technology has, and will, affect the population in terms of media consumption and behaviour. The quantitative study of more than 1,000 nationally representative respondents identified that 79% of tablet owners mostly use the device at home, with a further 33% saying that the tablet has affected their behaviour in the home.

• Globally, nearly all smartphones and tablets are corporate-liable devices, including most BYOD smartphones. Their purchase price or monthly voice/data services fees of $42 per user on average are paid for, in part or in full, by employers.<br />
• Organisations report plans to buy more Android than iOS corporate tablets in the next 12 months, a warning shot over the bow of iPad current business tablet dominance.<br />
• Microsoft Windows mobile devices barely show on the radar for corporate support and purchase plans. Microsoft and its partners must start addressing businesses and mobile worker needs.<br />
The average replacement cycle for business smartphones has shortened considerably to 1.1 years. RIM, whose smartphones still enjoy solid corporate support, must battle to retain customers who revisit smartphone decisions every year.

Acknowledging that its attempts to market a business-class Android tablet are over, Cisco Systems executives Thursday said the company is halting investments in the fledgling Cius product line.<p>

"[We] will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet," said Marthin DeBeer, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Video and Collaboration Group. "Instead, we're going to continue leveraging other people's tablets and move to deploy Jabber, as well as our other software on top of that," DeBeer told CRN.

WoA (Windows on ARM) tablet PCs, based on estimated general BOM costs of US$300-350 for 10-inch tablet PCs and US$150-200 for 7-inch models, are struggling to meet vendors' price targets for competition against Apple and Amazon's tablet PC products because of the additional US$90-100 fee for Windows 8, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.<p>

The average price of tablet PCs has been dropping rapidly sine the launch of Amazon's Kindle Fire. But PC brand vendors, who are used to price wars, are nevertheless struggling to compete, because unlike Amazon they do not see additional revenues from post-purchase content sales.

Laptops are doomed. In the next five years, tablets will displace notebook-style computers to become the dominant personal computing platform. And the transition from laptop to tablet has already begun.</p>

That’s the key finding of a new Forrester Research report that predicts the end of the laptop’s 15-year reign. The trend is already well under way among people born between 1980 and 2000, known to demographers as the millennial generation. In the U.S., 30% of tablet owners in this age group have purchased a tablet in place of a PC, compared to 20% of baby boomers.</p>

"For this growing body of [millennial] users, PCs will seem like clunky trucks rather than sleek cars, dampening their long-term propensity to buy conventional PCs," says the 19-page report authored by Forrester analyst Frank Gillett.

Apple shipped 11.8m iPads during the quarter, down from 15.4m units in the fourth quarter of 2011, and grew its worldwide share from 54.7% in 4Q11 to 68% in 1Q12. Amazon, which stormed into the market in 4Q11 to grab second place with 16.8% of the market on shipment of 4.8m units, saw its share decline significantly in the first quarter to just over 4%, falling to third place as a result. Samsung took advantage of Amazon's weakness to regain the number two position while Lenovo vaulted into the number four spot, followed by Barnes & Noble at number five.

Motorola’s mobile device unit accounted for 71 percent of its total sales, marking a boom in its smartphone and tablet business. The company did not disclose how many tablets it sold during the quarter. Boosted by the Droid Razr and the Droid Razr Maxx, which has a larger battery life, the two smartphones practically carried the company through the first few months of the year, just as it did on the previous quarter.</p><p>

Latest comScore figures show Motorola has just shy of 13% of the mobile OEM market share between December and March, though it dropped by 0.5%.

Based on current progress of development, there will be 32 Windows 8 tablet PCs launched by Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asustek Computer and Toshiba by the end of 2012, the sources indicated.</p><p> In particular, Lenovo and Acer plan to launch Windows 8 tablet PCs priced at US$300-1,000, with entry-level models to be sold at below US$300 for competition with Android tablet PCs and models offered by China-based white-box vendors, and models at over US$300 to challenge iPad, including the new iPad and a next-generation iPad, the sources claimed.

Toshiba’s new Excite line, which the Japanese electronics maker is officially announcing today, will include 7.7-inch, 10-inch and 13-inch models. All three Wi-Fi-only tablets are running Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system; they are aluminum-encased, have Gorilla Glass displays, come with a five-megapixel rear camera and a two-megapixel front-facing camera, and include new Nvidia TegraTM 3 processors.</p><p>
The Excite 7.7 also has an AMOLED display, a micro-USB port and a micro-SD card slot; while the Excite 10 has an LED-backlit display, micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports, and a full-sized SD card slot. At 1.32 pounds, the new 10-inch weighs just slightly less than Toshiba’s last tablet.

Samsung Electronics announced today (March 28th) that GALAXY Note, released in October last year,  has surpassed 5 million sales in just 5 months.
 
Thanks to the fast selling GALAXY Note, Samsung Electronics has gained about two thirds of the South Korean mobile phone market share, making Samsung the leading mobile phone provider in Korea in addition to China, France, Spain and others.

Strictly speaking, analysts say that its 5in size means they'll classify it as a tablet. Note too that these are "sales" to the retail channel - what others call "shipments".

However, it still means that the same two companies dominate in the smartphone and tablet markets. This is one of them. For an example of those struggling further down the tablet market, read on...

As a little kicker on the story, court filings have revealed that the device has produced pre-order numbers that are, shall we say, less than legendary.

It’s not entirely fair, of course, to compare a fragmented and developing ecosystem like Android tablets to the world leader, the iPad. After all, you don’t look at a new local restaurant and say “yeah well, McDonald’s has served billions.” Selling at that volume is by far the exception, not the rule. At the same time, Asus is a big company with lots of ambition in the tablet and mobile computing space, so we can at least hold them to the standard of a large and established company.

So when court filings reveal that pre-orders for this poster child for Android 4 tablets (and it does look great) total a whopping 2,000 units as of a month ago, it’s kind of a letdown. That and 80,000 going to retailers worldwide make the device seem rather minor even in comparison to other Android products like the Nook Color and Kindle Fire.

Taking Mac and iPad sales together, Apple sold more computers last year than any of the top PC makers.

Asked whether he envied Apple's ability to produce such coveted objects, [Dell chief commercial officer Steve] Felice said: "We come at the market in a different way ... We are predominantly a company that has a great eye on the commercial customer who also wants to be a consumer."

"In the areas where we come at the market, we think we are a coveted brand."

Despite an impressive debut by Amazon, which shipped 4.7m Kindle Fires into the market, Apple continued to see strong growth in the quarter, shipping 15.4m units in 4Q11, up from 11.1m units in 3Q11. That represents a 54.7% worldwide market share (down from 61.5% in 3Q11). Amazon's shipment total put the company in second place with 16.8% of the worldwide market.

Third-place Samsung grew its share from 5.5% in 3Q11 to 5.8% in 4Q11. Despite shipping more units, including its new Nook Tablet, Barnes & Noble saw its worldwide market share slip to 3.5% (down from 4.5%). Pandigital rounded out the top five, grabbing 2.5% of the market, down from 2.9% the previous quarter.

Google's approach, which is to say that apps should be screen-size-independent and that it's okay to blow up phone apps to tablet size, is simply wrong. Developers need to take different design approaches on a 4-inch screen and on a 10-inch one. There is no shortcut, no way around this.

The result is that you have a lot of apps on Android tablets—Twitter and Facebook are the most prominent—that function but look ugly and take lousy advantage of the real estate. They aren't grainy like iPhone apps blown up to 2x on an iPad, but they're awkward to use and full of blank space.

We see this problem regularly in the PCMag Labs when we try to do Android tablet app stories. It's easy to create a list of 75 great iPad apps. Building a list of great Android tablet apps is harder. On our last attempt, our software team only found 12.

"the clam-shell tablet runs a special version of the Android Honeycomb operating system that allows for dual-scren-tailored applications [sic]

Which I’m sure devs are just going to flock to, because if there’s one thing devs love, it’s fragmentation and designing apps specifically for an unproven device that’s probably going to vanish from the face of the planet within a few months.

Assuming that Google is firmly planted in reality, what are they actually going to do to meaningfully improve Android’s disappointing tablet sales and lack of much good tablet software?

More importantly, what can Google do?

With the realities of the tablet market (excuse me, “other platforms”), and with the existing Android hardware ecosystem and the software policies that let it get there, I don’t think I have a realistic, practical answer to suggest. I honestly have no idea what Google could meaningfully do about their tablet problems.

"I can't force someone to write a tablet app," he said, adding that developers are "looking at market share and... being frugal." But he said that it was Google's responsibility to evangelize the platform and sounded optimistic about the overall momentum of Android on tablets. "We're now starting to get on the radar, and I'm hoping people decide to put in the muscle and make their apps work great on tablets."

So how can a late entrant like Amazon, with little-to-no hardware DNA, waltz in and knock off a consumer electronics juggernaut like Samsung, a company that also enjoyed strong growth in 2011?  This is where we believe things get interesting.  In short, Amazon’s launch of Kindle Fire had more in common with an Apple-style launch than it did with aligning with the Android system. To date, the Android world has focused on marketing the operating system and the “power” of the devices, with quality of content and the consumer experience subordinated in priority.

The goal is to replace the bag of manuals and navigation charts weighing as much as 40 pounds that are carried by pilots and navigators, said Captain Kathleen Ferrero , a spokeswoman for the command. "The airline industry is way ahead of us on this," she said in a telephone interview. "Most, if not all of the major airliners are already switching to tablets."

First make sure that you have a back up of your Windows 8 Registry file so that it will be useful in case you face some problems.

Let's return to the big question - good, bad or indifferent sales?

Piper Jaffray had been predicting 5.6m will be sold this year (calendar year 2010), but on getting those official Apple numbers revised it downwards, to 4.3m. Forrester is rather less positive: it thinks 3m. iSuppli has the frankly hard-to-believe 7m in 2010, tripling by 2012.

Down 6% in 2011, that's where, according to the NPD Group

If it weren't for tablets and mobile phones, 2011 would have been a miserable year for the U.S. consumer electronics industry. Total U.S. retail sales for the year were $144 billion, down 1% from 2010, according to a report issued Monday by the NPD Group.

RIM UK PlayBook shipments took off in Q4 as price cuts finally convinced distributors to increase their orders.

According to data from Context, the number of RIM fondleslabs sold to UK wholesalers during Q4 was up nearly three fold on a sequential basis to 32,000 units, taking market share to 3.4 per cent.

Sinofsky also said that the Windows-on-ARM machines will come with several Office apps — Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that have been tuned to run in a very battery-efficient manner. But Sinofsky said that, although those applications will run in the traditional Windows desktop, they will be the only programs allowed to do so, other than components of Windows itself.

“There are no other compiled dekstop apps that are available,” Sinofsky told AllThingsD. All of the other apps for Windows on ARM will be the new-style “Metro” apps.

Windows 8 for Intel and AMD chips, by contrast, will be able to run all of the kinds of programs that have traditionally run on Windows, inside a Windows 7-like desktop environment.

ChangeWave asked 254 new Kindle Fire owners a series of questions regarding their overall satisfaction and key likes and dislikes, to gauge their reaction to the new tablet device.

Customer Satisfaction. When asked how satisfied they are with their new tablet device, better than one-in-two Kindle Fire owners (54%) say they are Very Satisfied. Another 38% say they are Somewhat Satisfied.

In previous ChangeWave surveys we've found that the percentage of tablet owners who say they are Very Satisfied with a particular device is highly predictive of future demand for that device. So how does the Amazon tablet rating match up against other tablet devices?

While the 54% Very Satisfied rating for the Kindle Fire is considerably below the 74% rating of the industry leading Apple iPad*, it is higher than the 49% average rating for all of the other tablet devices combined.

I finally had someone explain to me why Android will gain huge marketshare this year in the large-screen tablet wars (aka where iPad is dominant). It took USA’s #1 TV manufacturer, Vizio, to do it. Why didn’t Google have them on stage to show this off a few weeks back at Google IO?

This collection of tips and tricks for Android tablets range from settings to make them run better, to special features that can be unlocked by those who know about them. They work on any tablet running Honeycomb, which is most of them, and many should work on Ice Cream Sandwich, too.

What ICS doesn't magically change is the selection and quality of the tablet apps available in the Android Market. I have consistently pointed out the lack of tablet-optimized apps in my Honeycomb tablet reviews, and it looks like it will be a complaint that persists. While there have been some notable additions and there are some decent tablet-optimized apps (News360, Plume, and TapTu come to mind), others like Facebook and Twitter haven't been redesigned to take advantage of the higher resolution screen, making the experience flat-out disappointing.

Our world is always changing, and the way that children are being taught is also evolving everyday. Motorola Mobility believes in empowering students with innovative technology to help them not only learn better, but have more fun doing it. So earlier this year, we gave students at one San Diego high school Motorola XOOM tablets to see what would happen.

"While the iPad’s lead in the tablet market is obvious, it’s becoming more clear there’s strong competition for market share below it. The Amazon Kindle Fire represented an average of 2.4 ad impressions on Chitikas network for every 100 iPad impressions, but RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook wasn’t far behind; it viewed an average of 1.8 ad impressions for every 100 iPad impressions on Chitika’s mobile ad network."