Gadgets and gizmos

It looks like Amazon has just woken to the fact that 2011 is the year of the tablet and has opened a dedicated tablet store on both their UK and US facing sites. The pages show a plethora of tablets with a surprising list of best sellers and believe it or not the iPad 2 isn’t even in the top ten. Seem strange to you? It’s actually due to the iPad being out of stock and Amazon updates their best sellers on an hourly basis – no stock = no sales rank.

At the time of writing the Asus Eeepad was top of the charts; the 10.1 inch Android Honeycomb touting hybrid is both a notebook and tablet because the latter can be dismounted from the keyboard. The keyboard comes complete with SD slot, USB ports, multi-touch track pad and a battery that delivers 9.5 hours on top of the 6.5 hours provided on the tablet itself.

Three of the top ten tablets are original iPad’s, the 16GB version was ranking at number two, the 64GB 3G was ranking at number 5(priced at a whopping £751) and 32GB Wi-Fi coming in at number 10 – this shows that the original iPad is still selling well, possibly spurred on by the lack of second generation tablets and people looking for a bargain (64GB version aside).

Other top ten tabs included the Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 at number 3, the £186 A1CS X220 at number 4 with a handful of other Android powered tablets filling out the remainder of the top ten. So Amazon’s hit list is full of Android powered tablets with the Motorola Xoom not yet launched, will Apple regret having a shortfall or are they too far ahead of the game to worry?