slate

Our second live CNET Showcase event was all about the market for smaller-than-laptop computers: Slates, tablets, and Netbooks. We brought Dan Ackerman out from our New York office to argue with Donald Bell about the merits of different technologies and platforms, in front of a live audience.

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The video above is our discussion, in which we focus a lot on Apple's iPad and what it took to give it the market position it has: more than 3 million devices sold since it first … Read more

Turns out the iPhone grip of death is simply a "fact of life" with all wireless phones. If holding your phone makes your iPhone 4 signal drop dramatically, Apple would like you to know you should either hold it a different way or buy a case. From them. That sounds logical, right? Right. No, thanks. Also, introducing Rafe's new side project, oneleggedgoat.xxx. Enjoy.

Join us tonight for CNET Showcase Live, a discussion on tablets, slates, and Netbooks. Here in our San Francisco headquarters, we've gathered the latest portable technology from Apple, Asus, Archos, Nvidia, Panasonic, Samsung, and Toshiba. We're going to be showing off the gear to our in-person audience after a good discussion about the market and various vendors' approaches to it.

You can watch the discussion live over at CNET TV (in the Reporters' Roundtable slot), starting at 6 p.m. PDT. There's a live chat right under the streaming window, so you can participate with other viewers … Read more

On Thursday, June 24, at 6 p.m. PDT here in San Francisco at the CNET headquarters, we're hosting our second CNET Showcase Live event. This time, the focus is on tablets, slates, and Netbooks, and it promises to be an informative hands-on event for the people who can make it.

I'll start the event with a discussion between me, Donald Bell, and Dan Ackerman on the market for small, portable computers, and an overview of the existing and upcoming products. Then we'll break to the best part: the demos.

We're going to have great products … Read more

Before the iPad, it was often said that there has never been a successful electronics device in a screen size between the cell phone and the laptop. Indeed, the form factor and functionality of such devices have been tough nuts to crack, but there have been a few successes.

While the most widely adopted of these was the so-called "portable" DVD player embraced by many top-tier consumer electronics brands, a more modest success story has been the digital picture frame.

Cleverly branded, overgrown multimedia players that had undergone battery removal surgery, the digital picture frame was a star … Read more

There are many intriguing new laptops, tablets, and related mobile computing devices currently on display at the Computex 2010 trade show in Taiwan. Keep in mind, however, that many of these are either proof-of-concept prototypes or products unlikely to ever see the light of day in the U.S.

With that caveat, here are a some notable show highlights (a few of which have the word "pad" as part of their names), gleaned from the coverage of our colleagues at CNET Asia.

Pop quiz: Which one is the true tablet? Apple iPad, JooJoo, Dell Streak, or HP Slate?

If you guessed any of them you're right. Or you're wrong. Because the answer seems to depend on whom you ask.

The tablet category is heating up lately. IDC expects more than 7 million tablets to ship by the end of the year and more than 46 million units to ship by 2014. That is in large part due to the success of Apple's iPad, which has flown off store shelves since its introduction in April. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Asus, Fuijtsu, Acer, Archos, and many others have also flocked to the the decidedly gray area that tablets occupy between a smartphone and notebook.

Perhaps because the category is new, the definition of "tablet" seems sort of up for grabs, depending on who is defining it. Size, features, and specifications are the traditional way of breaking down consumer electronics and PC categories, but the few products currently for sale or coming soon are blurring those lines.

We take a crack at dampening some of the confusion around the latest crop of consumer tablets. (For a complete list of tablets, see the guide put together by CNET's Donald Bell.)

What makes a tablet a tablet? Traditionally the categories of mobile computing devices break down in terms of size: smartphones have 3- to 5-inch screens, MIDs (mobile Internet devices) range between 5 and 7 inches, and tablets are between 7 and 10 inches.

But the feature set, or what the device can do, is the other half of the equation. According to Gartner, a true tablet is any slate over 5 inches running a full operating system like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

IDC breaks the devices down into media tablets and tablet PCs. A tablet PC has an x86 processor, runs a desktop OS, and has a screen size anywhere from 5 inches to 21 inches. Despite what it may look like, "A tablet PC is a PC," said Richard Shim, IDC analyst. "There's no real limit to them."

These are generally the traditional idea of a tablet, the kind that look like a laptop with a screen that twists that you can close and write on with a stylus, like the Dell Latitude XT or the Asus Eee PC T91.

"A media tablet we're defining as ARM-based, running a smaller OS (non-Windows)," he said. "The screen sizes are between 7 and 12 inches." ARM is a type of low-power processor typically used in mobile devices, whereas x86 processors are used in more robust applications where power consumption isn't as much of an issue.

How do the current crop of tablets compare? There's a pretty big range in IDC's and Gartner's definitions if you compare the features of a few of the recently announced or released tablets intended for consumer use.… Read more

The first CNET Showcase event, on 3D TVs, was enough of a success that we've turned right around and set up another one.

On June 24, we'll be putting on Showcase No. 2 at our San Francisco headquarters, this time focusing on slates, tablets, and Netbooks.

We'll kick off the event with a discussion among me and two CNET Reviews experts: Donald Bell (slates and tablets) and Dan Ackerman (Netbooks and notebooks). Then we'll open up a mini trade show, giving our live audience the chance to check out the latest slim and small computers and … Read more

Microsoft needs an answer to Apple's iPad and that should be some sort of Windows-based consumer tablet.

At least that is the position that analysis firm Forrester takes in a new report, which argues that tablets are "the next important computing form."

"To keep its products front and center, Microsoft needs a partner to produce a successful Windows tablet that competes with the Apple iPad," analysts JP Gownder and Sarah Rotman Epps said in a report released on Thursday. "At stake is nothing less than the future of the operating system."

Microsoft CEO … Read more