News Week of March 14, 2010

Tablet PC Pioneer Wins Turing Award

Charles P. Thacker, veteran hardware developer at the Xerox Corp.'s PARC and Microsoft, picks up the prestigious $250,000 prize.

But Thacker always seemed to be ahead of his time, producing early-stage innovations, only to watch his contributions be embodied in later successful products. The tablet PC that he developed for Microsoft is a case in point. It debuted in 2001 and logged sluggish sales, but many of its concepts have been taking off lately. Apple's iPad tablet, due to ship in a few days, may be the latest example.   (Source: -->W. David Gardner,
InformationWeek )

Apple iPad orders drop sharply

With three weeks and two weekends left before they ship, I wouldn't expect much more than half a million in pre-orders and reservations," he says.

"My best guess, although very tentative given the early stage and few data we have so far, would be that they hit the 1 million unit milestone by the second week after it ships," he told Fortune. "But this is a very speculative guesstimate based on just a weekend of pre-orders."

Tello's estimates are based on 120 orders for 137 iPads over 58 hours, starting at 8:30 a.m. ET Friday.  (Source: Philip Elmer-DeWitt, CNN)

Samsung Prepping a Consumer-Oriented Tablet Computer

Samsung is going to take another swing at making a full-fledged computer in a tablet design. This is being designed to compete with Apple's iPad, and Samsung promises its device will offer far more features.

Philip Newton, the head of Samsung Australia's IT division, said in an interview that his company likes the general design of Apple's tablet, but believes it is going to be hobbled by its ARM-based processor and lack of input and output ports.

�I do feel that that slate-type platform has legs but I think the legs need to be far more powerful, for example an Atom-based product which has far greater flexibility, not to mention inputs and outputs. This has more potential than an iPad," said Newton.   (Source: Ed Hardy, TabletPCReview.com)