eWEEK Readers Not All That Sure About Tablets

The biggest group of eWEEK readers in our tablet poll actually didn’t want a tablet at all. But the tablet concept is pretty solidly popular – around 70 percent of you have a particular brand of tablet you favour.

It looks as if the tablet market really is wide open, from your opinions, and this year’s Mobile World Congress, where we got hands-on time with Intel’s MeeGo, as well as  RIM’s PlayBook, and HP’s WebOS  TouchPad . “Give me a laptop” took an early lead, and stayed a nose ahead of the next option choice. But four major tablet brands fell within a few percentage points of each other, and plenty of other ideas cropped up as “other” votes.

All tablet life is here…

Not surprisingly, the iPad came top, especially as we allowed the teasing prospect of the  iPad 2, at 19 percent not far behind the humble laptop’s 22 percent.  The RIM PlayBook is hot on the iPad’s heels as a business device with 16 percent.

With 13 percent of the vote, the Samsung Galaxy Tab had plenty of fans, and the Galaxy Tab 2 launched at Mobile World Congress didn’t do it any harm. And Windows tablets, despite the fact that the tablet version of Windows does not exist yet, got a solid ten percent of your votes.

So those were the four front runners: iPad, Android, RIM and Windows. Next up, the “other” category, which included a nice bag of things we forgot to include. Several voted for the Notion Ink Adam Android tablet, and we had a solid couple of votes for Motorola’s Xoom.

What about the also-rans? Cisco’s Cius got a smidgin of support and, of the two individual Windows tablets we offered you, the British-designed iTablet got a tiny twitch of the buzzers, while the rugged Motion CL909 got our first ever “Nul Points”.

For completeness, we also had one reader who – in the “Other” category – saw our Luddite laptop option, and raised us, saying “None of the above – the best business machine is a desktop”.

And one voter pitched in with the longest established, and most essential business tablet, the one which would have swept all before it if we had included it as a top-line option. Aspirin.

Where will your WEEE go?

Next time we are going green and serious. We want to know where your business sends its waste electrical and eletronic equipment (WEEE).

The European Union has voted to tighten up the directive but we aren’t fooled. Disposing of  any electronnic goods responsibly is a difficult thing, and we know (because Greenpeace tells us) that a lot of it ends up in illegal shipments to the developing world, where it actually kills people who spend their lives trying to retrieve chemicals from a toxic soup of solvents.

We don’t expect any of you will say you knowingly send your kit off to illegal processing abroad. But we want to know what you are doing with it. We want to know how many of you are successfully taking the good path of getting your electronic kit re-used (preferrably) or ethically recycled.

And we also want you to tell us what you think of the whole e-waste dilemma. Use your vote, click on the “Other” option, and add your comments below to let us know.