With the unveiling ceremony of the Apple iPad, a new era has supposedly begun – tablets are finally to become fashionable. Following that announcement, many makers decided they had to surf this new trend. Rumours started about every single brand, and many brands themselves started rumours about their upcoming products.
Some like Archos decided to keep making what they became famous for: PMPs or rather bigger PMPs. But the new Archos 7 Home Tablet to be released in June will please the crowds with its not-too-big yet not-too-small form factor, and its attractive price: $199, €149, £129. At such a low price, a hardware made of an ARM Cortex 600 MHz, 800x480 resolution and 400MB RAM doesn’t sound very disappointing.
Archos 7 Home Tablet

Big IT competitors Dell and HP do not want to be left behind. If HP announced a Slate, everything changed after Palm’s purchase: the company now plans to release a new tablet – or the same updated tablet –, the HP Hurricane with WebOS, Palm’s most recent OS innovation. It should be available around Q3.

The first rumours about Dell were heard in January, but since then the Dell Mini 5, now known as the Dell Streak 5, is still not available on the market. It will probably be postponed until June, or maybe summer. Recently there were more rumours about 7” and 10” versions. All versions should run Android.
German manufacturer Neofonie will release the WeTab (formerly marketed as WePad), probably around July. The company chose to bet on a larger device with 11 inches.

Chinese manufacturer Aigo will also release a rather powerful 7” tablet running Android 2.1, with an ARM Cortex A9 @ 1GHz, as much as 32GB storage on the higher end version, and 800x480 resolution.