Apple, Microsoft, Nokia do battle on Tablet Tuesday

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The world’s tech giants are launching their bids for your holiday shopping buck today, with the unveiling of two new tablet devices and the arrival of a third on store shelves.

Call it Tablet Tuesday — a head-to-head-to-head battle between Apple, Microsoft, and Nokia.

At 10 a.m. in San Francisco, Apple is expected to reveal the iPad 5 and a new iPad Mini, but Microsoft is starting to cut into Apple’s market dominance with the Surface 2 on sale today.

“The Surface does have some things that the iPad doesn’t. It has a full-size USB port so you can plug in a flash drive if you want to, and it has the kickstand built-in in the back so that you can easily prop it up and pair it with one of the optional keyboards,” says Dana Wollman, managing editor of the tech site Engadget.

Now consumers have to make a choice between traditional tablets and newer hybrid designs.

“You wouldn’t necessarily want to spend a thousand dollars on each kind of device. It’s either do you want a laptop with a touch screen or do you maybe want something like the Surface Pro 2 that can be a tablet sometimes and can be a laptop replacement other times and can be a little bit of both?” explains Wollman.

Nokia is expected to enter the tablet market today, but has been especially tight-lipped about it’s first-ever design, expected to run on Windows 8.

“It’s funny. We do know it exists because Nokia already filed a document with the US Federal Communications Commission saying that it intends to sell this tablet through AT&T and Verizon. So this tablet, whatever it is, is going to run on 4G,” she adds.

Nokia is also expected to reveal a “phablet” —  a six inch phone-tablet hybrid.

News1130 tech specialist Mike Yawney is in San Francisco and will be live-blogging the iPad launch at 10 a.m., likely including sharper screens, possibly thinner forms and new colours.

The pressure is on, with Apple no longer the leader in a market it invented in 2010 with the very first iPad.

Today, Android tablets, many of them cheaper and put out under a number of brands, have 50 per cent worldwide market share, according to new research.  Apple is now trailing at 49 per cent — a very steep drop from just two years ago.

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