in the wake of the iPad there was an almost eerie silence from the rest of the PC industry. Many companies demonstrated iPad competitors at CES in January this year. But rather than there being a rush of products to market to compete with Apple's launch, the only real news of these has been of the cancellations of the high profile HP Slate and Microsoft's Courier prototype.
If you equate this with other manufacturers giving up on the tablet then you are wrong. Over the next week expect to see an explosion in news about tablets as the annual Computex trade show hits Taipei. This is the venue where manufacturers from the technology heartland show off new products, which almost invariably includes dozens of takes on the trendy technology of the moment.
In the past this has included media centre PCs, small form factor systems, ridiculously lit gaming hardware, netbooks and smartphones. This year the trend are tablets, and while little has been confirmed, we expect to see a raft of weird, wild and wonderful product on the show floor.
