Weeks ago, I wrote about the swarm of new tablets that were on the verge of being released in hopes of challenging the iPad's dominance in this emerging market, and now that Apple has hit the 1 million sales mark for the iPad, this issue becomes more pertinent than ever.
However, the two most promising tablets (the HP Slate and Microsoft Courier) have both been scrapped and won't go into production, and whether or not the companies are working on new ones has yet to be seen.
While this is great news for Apple, this is a huge blow to tablet technology as a whole. The iPad now defines the market for tablets, and that means there will be less innovation. Why would Apple need to innovate if there's no viable competition?
We've discussed the computer industry's failure to change and innovate before, and the same lesson applies here: the technology as a whole will suffer if no one is there to push for newer and better designs.
This leaves the Dell Streak as the last big-name company with a tablet device still in the works. Hopefully it won't succumb to the same fate as the HP Slate and Microsoft Courier, because as exciting as tablet technology appears to be, it will require innovation and competition to stay that way.
