Have they finally woken up?

Lately there has been a flurry of devices – tablets, smartphones, etc. – that are providing a good user experience. Has everyone finally woken up after getting their ass handed to them by Apple?

Back in the late summer, we a few companies floating their digital-magazine-on-a-tablet format. The goal appears to be getting out in front of Apple, who has been rumored to be developing a tablet for many years now (basically all the way back to 2002, with the project being killed many times). Though, I would guess Apple already has a format written down someone, but they aren’t sharing it yet.

Next, we get a host of other companies attempting to develop sleek, stylish tablets. Nvidia showed a Tegra-based tablet that looked like a mock-up of something Apple would have come up with (a large screen and one “home” button). Other tablets (Notion Ink Smartpad, etc) are set to be unveiled and showed off at CES in early January.

Do I think Apple has anything to worry about on the tablet front? Not really – they’ve shown they can out innovate just about anyone. They’ve also got the tremendous mindshare of the iPod and iPhone. Finally is the App Store – getting developers to do some (hopefully) minor work to port any apps over to the tablet means they’ve got a huge lead on anyone else who tries to enter the market. An Intel Atom-based tablet is a pipe dream for the time being – the power consumption is too high and Windows 7 (required for multitouch support) will push the bill of materials up (faster Atom, 2GB of RAM, etc) in order to provide a good experience.

It wont be as smooth as a ride Apple had with the iPhone – it took three years from the initial announcement for someone to finally come out with a device that even came close to the iPhone (Droid). And Apple might get off to a slow start – they like to grow their products organically. The iPhone initially didn’t have App support, it even took many months for them to support saving web pages to icons on the home screen. But over the course of two years, the product grew up – gaining App support, MMS, Cut Copy Paste, landscape apps (Mail, Messages), video, etc., to finally a product that is mature and can start to explore areas that cell phones and even smart phones have never tread before (payment processing, and who knows what else).