The Dark Horse Among Tablets In 2012

We are seeing plenty of new tablets emerge at the CES 2012, which opened earlier today with a record number of more than 3100 exhibitors that have prepared more than 25,000 product announcements that are available to about 150,000 visitors over the next few days. Among those tablets is a particularly noteworthy device that could have a huge impact on the tablet market, if it works as promised.

I am not talking about OLPC’s XO3, which is equally important for the developing world. My attention is wrapped up in the Wikipad that sparks the kind of innovative risk we so desperately need in the Android tablet segment. It’s a nicely designed 8-inch device that has three special touches. First, it can be purchased with an attachable game controller unit that creates a product that could be considered a Super WiiU and could turn into a problem for Nintendo, at least if the app growth for Android continues and more and more casual and high-end games will make their way onto the platform. Second, the manufacturer claims that the Wikipad as a 1080p screen, which would be rather stunning, if it was able to squeeze 1920×1080 pixels into 8 inches of display size. The icing on the cake is a naked-eye 3D touch screen that visualizes the Android 4.0 OS surface.

There aren’t any other details besides the fact that there is only 8 GB of flash storage (expandable via micro SD), HDMI and USB 2.0 as well as 1080p video playback. The simple screen data alone suggests that this device will need a powerful processor, even if we know that lower-end single-core 1080p SoCs can cope with 1080p, but we would think that at least a dual- and, better, a quad-core unit will be necessary to run 3D.

There is no information on price, but we don’t think that this is your typical $199 tablet that will compete with the Kindle Fire. The manufacturer notes that the Wikipad will be powerful enough to run the “latest high-end video games through new cloud gaming services,” which indicates that we are looking at a much more expensive product here. However, if the device can be offered for less than $500 including the game controller as well as a full Android experiences with unlimited access to Android Market while maintaining acceptable battery life, this could turn into a stunning product. We haven’t seen the device in action, but if it delivers the goods, this may be the dark horse to keep an eye on this year.

So far, it is one of the very few tablets that could match or even be ahead of Apple’s iPad 3, which is also believed to integrate a Retina display with a resolution of 2048×1536 pixels that creates a 3D surface effect via multiple display layers.

Kurt Bakke in Products on January 10