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Tablets to become biggest computing category??

Before Computex the worlds second-biggest IT trade fair kicked off earlier this month, the hype about which tablet personal computer would challenge the ipad was in full swing!

Jen-hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, the specialist graphics company that is also a big supplier of chips for tablet PCs kicked things off by making the prediction that within five years “tablets will be the world’s biggest computing category”. Huang said tablets could even surpass netbooks and notebook PCs in terms of volume.

This a very bold claim given that Gartner expects only 12 million tablet-like devices to be sold this year and even the most optimistic of predictions say tablets would only take up 50-60 million of the 700 million PCs sold worldwide by 2014. It was also a dig at Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini who earlier said that tablets would not “eat the netbooks and notebooks lunch”

And Huang isn’t the only one thinking along these lines. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that personal computers running rival Microsoft’s Windows operating system are in a permanent decline and that only a fraction of current users will still rely on them in the future.

In a rare onstage interview at the D: All Things Digital conference, Mr Jobs compared the fate of the PC to trucks in agrarian America. The dominant vehicle when farming was the way most people earned a living, they were vastly outnumbered by cars when the country became more urbanised.

The same thing will happen with PCs, where “one out of every x” people will continue to use them, he told the Dow Jones event hosts. The shift “is going to make us nervous”, speaking of multiple generations used to the machines.

And with Apple selling over 3 million ipads in the first 80 days of release Mr.Jobs and Huang may very well be proved right