Motorola reportedly plans to ship as many as 800,000 Xoom tablets during the first quarter of 2011, while Research in Motion hopes to ship a million BlackBerry PlayBook devices. I tend to avoid this sort of story, because it doesn’t actually tell you how many people will buy these devices, only how ambitious the manufacturers are feeling. But in this case, that ambition is kind of the story in its own right.

Apparently the OEMs in charge of building Motorola’s Android tablet and RIM’s new BlackBerry PlayBook have received rather large orders which seems to be a pretty good indication that the market will soon be flooded with tablets.

Tablet computers, of course, are nothing new. Major PC makers have been cranking out Windows tablets for the past ten years, but these have typically been premium devices with premium features and premium price tags. Apple changed the market when it launched the iPad at $499 and up and targeting casual consumers rather than business and niche customers.

At CES this year, we saw dozens, if not hundreds of tablets of all shapes and sizes. Most are designed to run Google Android or Windows 7 and to be honest, it’s getting a bit difficult to tell one from the next, which is one of the reasons the BlackBerry PlayBook is interesting — it’s something different, and from one I can tell, it’s something pretty good. HP is also expected to unveil its own take soon, with a webOS tablet. With literally millions of these devices set to hit the market soon, I guess we’ll soon see whether the iPad is unique or whether there’s actually huge demand for all sorts of portable tablets.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,546 other subscribers

2 replies on “Motorola, RIM have big plans for tablets”

  1. Not only Apple, Samsung has also proved that tablets are saleable. And think of the hype surrounding the Notion Ink Adam. It is built by an unknown company and still it has generated considerable interest among the public. I have no doubt that many of the upcoming tablets including the Xoom and Playbook will do exceptionally wel in the market

Comments are closed.