CE industry still scrambling to answer Apple’s revolutionary iPad

“Tablets may have been the most talked-about new gizmos of 2010, but nearly all the talk was about one model: Apple’s iPad, which instantly defined the category when Steve Jobs unveiled it nearly a year ago,” Harry McCracken writes for TIME Magazine.

Last week, “the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center positively bulged with the things, including newly-announced contenders from Dell, Motorola, Panasonic, Toshiba, and other tech behemoths, as well as smaller players such as HDTV manufacturer Vizio and bargain-basement dweller Coby,” McCracken writes. “Even Polaroid was showing one.”

McCracken writes, “Despite the flurry of activity, the rest of the industry is still scrambling to answer the iPad. It’ll be a few months before it’s possible to separate the winners from the also-rans: No major debutante was available for immediate purchase, most manufacturers were cagey about pricing, and some models don’t have names yet.”

“I also fret that the industry’s reliance on one software supplier may result in most models feeling like bland kissing cousins,” McCracken writes. “(It’s tough for companies to differentiate tablets through hardware design alone: In the end, they’re all just skinny slabs of various sizes.)”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Sometimes, as with Ballmer, we almost think that Schmidt is secretly working for Apple.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Lynn W.” for the heads up.]