Since the advent of the iPad and Apple's expected goal of selling over 60 million of them across the country in 2011, many hardware developers found themselves looking into how they could cash in on the tablet market. Earlier, the G-Slate was released at a discounted price when purchased with a T-Mobile data plan. Still, it will retail for about $150 more than an iPad with equivalent memory. What makes this hardware worth the extra cash? A few outstanding features that set it above and beyond the iPad. If you're looking for economy, wait for the iPad to drop in price. If you're looking for the new standard in tablet technology, the bar definitely just got higher. The G-Slate is a widescreen tablet that features attractive specs across the board. This baby can record in both HD and 3D using the 5MP camera on its back, allowing total integration with 3D TVs that are hot on the market. There's a second camera on the front of the device for video chat, as with the iPad. It features 32 gigs of internal memory and a dual-core 1GHz processor that displays beautiful streaming graphics via NVIDIA technology. It can be used on the T-Mobile 4G network -- when purchased with a plan or of course -- and has full Wi-Fi capabilities.

What tends to gum up the quick, impulse buys on tablets (except the iPad) seems to be the drastic lack of apps available. Apple currently has over 65,000 applications available for the series of "i" devices. It's expected that the full suite of apps available for the G-Slate, (which runs on android technology) will be somewhere around two dozen for a while. Many of these were developed in light of the Xoom, Motorola's tablet that was recently released as the first Android 3.0 Honeycomb device. Among the biggest complaints people have had about Android is its lack of cooperation with Adobe Flash. G-Slate doesn't automatically come loaded to run Flash, but can easily be configured with a simple software update. Unfortunately, the Flash can still come through rather choppy, according to consumers using the Flash update.

For better or for worse, the tablets are rolling out reliably from companies trying to get their piece of the Apple pie. Many of these have let gadget lovers down, though the G-Slate appears to offer something truly unique without reinventing the wheel or showing weakness compared to the iPad. Motorola is hoping for just 300,000 sales of the Xoom in '11 but the device was pitifully lacking. It could be "I told you so" to Apple when a competitor rears 3D recording, superfast processing and uses them to take away a significant portion of the market. Source: WSJ