Focus News Mobile

As if the choice of smartphones, tablets, netbooks and MIDs weren’t confusing enough, operators are trying to sub-divide the market into even smaller categories, including the emerging ‘tablet-netbook’. This is starting life at carriers like O2 and Orange as a ‘family organizer’ but will evolve into a quick-access wireless product for getting into household content stores or the internet, without booting up a PC or grappling with a smartphone interface.

The new breed of home tablet may turn out to be a white elephant, like many other product types with ‘tablet’ in the title over the years, but many companies are having a go, with Samsung and Apple both rumored to be developing such products for next year. This loosely defined category usually promises access to the internet and the user’s home media or PC servers, via a simple touchscreen interface and Wi-Fi or 3G. Such products may also integrate with the home phone and broadband line, to bring IP telephony and unified communications capabilities to the home – as Verizon’s new Hub does. Most support visual voicemail and a series of widgets for reaching content.

O2 recently announced its Joggler, which is marketed as a ‘virtual Post-it’ for the household, and is now being chased by Orange, whose Tabbee is launching in France but should come to the UK soon. The Tabbee currently only uses Wi-Fi but a future release will also have 3G. It is a seven-inch touchscreen tablet made by Sagem, and, says the operator, will be a useful alternative if someone else in the house is using the PC, or if the user cannot be bothered to boot up. It claims three hours of battery life with “intensive use” including media viewing and, unlike the deskbound Joggler, is portable. Photos, video and music can be played, either streamed or loaded from USB sticks or SD cards. Like the O2 gadget, Tabbee features a family message board/organizer, and widgets for updates such as weather or traffic reports. It also has a desktop charging dock.

The Tabbee, once it has 3G, could be an alternative to a netbook, since it has an on-screen keyboard, though its price tag of €299 is almost as high as the cost of a rapid-boot netbook with Wi-Fi, so may prevent mass uptake. At the moment it falls between two stools – similar to an iPod Touch but twice the size, not quite a netbook – but if well executed, could be in the vanguard of an emerging new breed of mobile internet devices.

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