CES Tablets Jockey for Traction Against Apple's iPad

It's showtime for the approximately 85 tablet computers introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show as they challenge Apple's iPad. The big question is which CES tablet, maybe Motorola's Xoom or Research In Motion's PlayBook, will capture second place in a market dominated by the iPad. Android tablets are expected to be big challengers.

The dust is settling from the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, and the positioning has begun. One of the hottest questions is which product will emerge as the second-place contender against Apple's iPad, the leader in the tablet category.

Going into CES, Samsung had a credible claim to second place with its Galaxy Tab being distributed by all four major U.S. carriers. The company said it shipped a million units in the first two months of release.

More Than 85 Tablets

But CES can reshuffle perception and momentum, as Nintendo's Wii and other devices can demonstrate. But while the gaming-console category is a battle between three contenders, including Microsoft and Sony, there was no shortage of tablets at this year's CES.

Some contenders included tablets from Lenovo, Dell, NEC, Acer, Motorola, Research In Motion, Toshiba, Samsung, ASUS and others. By some counts, more than 85 tablets were announced at the show.

Two tablets receiving a great deal of post-CES attention are Motorola's Xoom and RIM's PlayBook.

Motorola stoked anticipation for its tablet with a pre-show, highly engaging video that literally put its product on a pedestal -- under wraps as the latest evolution in a museum exhibition of the greatest tablets in history. The lineage started with the Ten Commandments.

As unveiled at CES, Motorola's Xoom sports dual-core processors, compatibility with 4G, HDMI-out, a two-megapixel camera in front and a five-megapixel camera in back, and a 10-inch screen. It also uses Android 3.0, known as Honeycomb, which has been optimized for tablets. And it has a secret asset -- a built-in barometer for measuring atmospheric pressure in case you want to predict your own weather.

RIM's PlayBook contains a one-gigahertz ARM processor, a seven-inch screen, 1GB of RAM, HDMI-out, and two cameras -- a three-megapixel in front and a five-megapixel in back. There's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and, for 3G connections, the PlayBook connects through Bluetooth to a BlackBerry smartphone.

Whither Sony, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard?

Other tablets that gained attention include Toshiba's, with a 10-inch display and what the company calls Adaptive Technology to automatically adjust visual and audio settings to match the environment. Vizio's Via Plus has three speakers for left, right and center spatial separation and an infrared emitter that can act as a universal remote for home theaters.

The ASUS Eee Pad Slider features a slide-out keyboard, and Lenovo showed the IdeaPad U1, which can flip between being a Windows 7 or Android notebook , or an Android tablet. And a dual-screen tablet from NEC, the Cloud Communicator, shown at CES as a prototype, could point to the next generation of tablet form factors.