2010 was heralded as the year of the tablet, but besides the iPad’s run-away success, not much else happened. Next year will be the tablet’s year, starting off with CES in January, where the Palmpad and countless other tablets will debut. Market research firm, iSuppli agrees, too. Their estimates peg flash memory shipments for tablets to triple next year.
This trend is expected to continue for the next few years as computing devices move away from spinning discs in general and instead opt for solid state memory types. Truly portable computers like tablets and smartbooks will continue to reach new demographics and therefore increasing their sales. The year Walmart sells a tablet other than the iPad will signal the acceptance of the form factor.
iSupply estimates that by 2014, the average NAND flash memory density for devices will be 65GB where it’s only 28GB right now. But you probably already knew that. Flash memory capacity tends to grow exponentially, which is kind of ironic seeing how local memory is increasingly becoming not as useful as data is moving into the cloud. But still, I won’t turn down 64GB in a cell phone.