In case you got all caught up in the Apple Tablet madness that was yesterday, now might be a good time to remind you that there are dozens of other companies working on touchscreen tablets designed to fill the niche between smartphones and notebooks. You know, if that’s an actual niche that people want to see filled. That remains to be seen.
Anyway, one of the more intriguing devices I spotted at CES was a barely-functional 10 inch tablet from MSI. It sported an NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset, which means that the low power device should get decent battery life while surfing the web, playing games, reading books, or watching HD video. The MSI tablet was hardly the only device fitting this description on display at the show, but MSI has made a pretty good name for itself by pumping out quality netbooks, video cards, and other products in the last few years, so I actually believe that this tablet has a decent chance of making it to market.
And according to DigiTimes, the MSI tablet will hit the streets in the second half of 2010 for about $500. That’s pretty much the same price as the base model of the Apple iPad. It’s not quite clear how the two devices will stack up on a feature-by-feature basis. We do know that the MSI tablet will run Google Android while the iPad will run the iPhone OS. And the widescreen MSI tablet will be capable of handling 1080p HD video while the iPad tops out at at 720p video playback on its 1024 x 768 pixel display. I’m also fairly certain that MSI’s device will be able to handle multitasking, and by the time it’s released, Android should be able to support Adobe Flash.
But there are still a few question marks about storage, memory, and wireless connectivity options.
