If you've seen one tablet, you've seen 'em all: a flat slab with a glass front. A few hardware companies want to break that image with a different kind of slate: the hybrid.
It's based on the idea that your tablet can be more than just an armchair device. Hook your pad up to a keyboard -- sometimes provided, sometimes an optional accessory -- and it's an instant laptop solution, a relatively low-cost netbook for times when a touchscreen keyboards may not suffice.
"Hybrid tablets represent an attempt by manufacturers to fully explore the space of design possibilities," Gartner research analyst Ray Valdes says. Hardware companies need to find a sweet spot with their tablet offerings, or "sustainable market niches" as Valdes puts it, in order to differentiate from what other companies are doing.
As new tablets hit the market every week, manufacturers are doing everything they can to stand out among the crowd. HTC was one of the first to experiment with the option of adding a stylus with its Flyer tablet, and Lenovo also plans to offer a tablet with an accompanying pen. Other companies have played with the idea of the form factor, sizing tablets anywhere from 7 to 10 inches in screen size. The tablet-laptop lookalike is the latest iteration of the theme.
"With hybrids, product designers are moving the needle in one direction and then back again," Valdes said. "First strip out certain aspects of a netbook or laptop, such as the keyboard, and then reverse course by adding these pieces back in."
The Asus Eee Pad Slider, for instance, is playing with the idea of the tablet-netbook hybrid. Essentially, Asus takes the concept of a smartphone slide-out keyboard and brings it to the tablet form, somewhat like a gigantic Motorola Droid phone. It's an evolution of the company's first big hybrid option, the Eee Pad Transformer.
Similarly, Lenovo plans to debut its ThinkPad tablet this fall, easily the most interesting of three tablet devices the company will release this year. Aimed at the business crowd that needs to respond to e-mails quickly, the ThinkPad comes with an optional folio-style case, complete with keyboard attachment. From what we've seen, it looks like a nice compromise between a carrying case and a functional peripheral input device. Keeping in line with the ThinkPad laptop heritage, the signature red-dot arrow controller appears smack in the middle of the keyboard.
Of course, there's no guarantees that a hybrid hardware solution will actually work. Earlier this year, Motorola released its Atrix 4G smartphone in conjunction with a laptop dock accessory. If you decide to buy the dock, you can hook your Atrix into the back port and use the phone's scalable interface to run as a laptop. While a cool idea in theory, Motorola's problem lay in the pricing: The laptop dock costs $500 -- quite costly for an accessory. Ultimately, the price proved to be too much for the average smartphone shopper, barring the device from widespread popularity.
There's also the issue of where to sell a hybrid product like the Atrix. "A store like Best Buy will struggle with where to put an in-between device," Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Wired.com in an e-mail. "Motorola has pushed the Atrix through the carrier channel," by selling the phone through AT&T retail stores, "and that’s clearly been a failure," Rotman Epps wrote. "Hybrids are innovative but there’s nowhere to sell them."
Still, experimentation seems to be one of a few viable options for manufacturers, even outside of Android. To compete with the massive success of the iPad, companies like Microsoft and HP -- which have their own mobile operating software offerings -- While we've seen little in hybrid tablets outside of Android-based ones thus far, Valdes "expects to see similar design variants on other mobile platforms." With a keyboard docking option, Windows 7-powered tablets like Acer's Iconia Tab W500 can take advantage of the Windows 7 interface, which still relies on mouse and keyboard navigation.
Often offered at prices lower than $600, the hybrid tablet could potentially appeal to those that don't want to shell out a grand or more for a new laptop, though still want the mobile experience that can't be found in a netbook.
"Certain people are just not going to have computers," wrote Maciek Gorzkowski of London based communications firm JWT, in a report provided to Wired.com. "Tablets are in the ballpark of cheap laptops. And if it has built-in 3G, it will do things better than a laptop."
It's difficult for us to see that happening right away, especially when considering releases like Apple's new MacBook Air; it improves upon the previous generation in numerous ways, yet gives a boost in computing power far beyond that seen in any tablet. There's also the option of the Chromebook, a browser-based netbook-like laptop powered by Google's Chrome OS, which can also be picked up for less than six hundred bucks.
The tablet hybrid is, however, yet another choice in a market filled with many options that all pretty much look the same. At the very least the hardware companies are trying to innovate -- whether the results are successful or not is another matter entirely.
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