The Motorola Xoom was just one tablet debuting at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show
Dozens of our customers and clients are using the Apple iPad and find it an incredibly useful business tool, newspaper, magazine and book reading device, and a perfect movie player with great battery life. What we appreciate is that they find it delightful to load ALL of their Trend Album™ reports on it (here is our how-to on loading them on your iPad). In this way they have all of them at-their-fingertips in meetings, on an airplane, or when they head to a trade show. Since the iPad has such phenomenal resolution and good color fidelity, it’s turned out to be a perfect way to keep an archive of all Trend Albums and with them all the time.
Since we forecast trends several years out for the home furnishings industry, we also do the same thing in technology. Though it will take another year or two before we’ll see people able to completely ditch their laptop or desktop computers in favor of a tablet, there is no question in our minds that you will soon own one.
The good news from the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is that this trend is accelerating dramatically and many (including us) are predicting that 2011 will be the “Year of the Tablet.” Lending credence to that claim is that there were seventy (70) tablets being displayed on the show floor at CES! They vary in screen size (from 7″ to 10.1″ sized displays), most run Google’s Android operating system, and the user interface and displays will make any user of an iPad instantly comfortable (yes, knocking off Apple from their paradigm-shifting-perch as the dominant player in the tablet space seems to be the objective. Especially since Apple currently enjoys 95% market share of the tablet market).
As these new devices ship to retailers, The Trend Curve™ will be supporting the key ones so you’ll be able to enjoy having your trend products with you at all times.
Take a peek at this video from the just-announced Best Buy On website. They had a crew at CES and have this short video overview of the tablets announced there: