Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and new Galaxy Tab 10.1 hands-on

"phones are a "necessary" device whereas a tablet is a luxury device"

Ok, but are smart phones a necessary device? What if your phone reverts back to just a dial and talk unit while the "smart" part migrates into the tablet you are carrying with you? [not that I think that will save Nokia :-)]

"consumers don't want another carrier contract so most tablets are sold without subsidies or contracts, whereas nearly all phones here are sold with subsidies and 2-year contracts."

Except the Android Revolution as envisioned by Google is that nobody wants contracts at all. So perhaps a single contract? How about a Wifi tablet connected via tether to a single contract phone? Or both your phone and tablet using SIP over a Metro-Fi scale white spaces network? I believe auction priced spectrum at the consumer level without contract will become a key business in the next 10 years.

"with phones, the carriers have influence/control over what devices are available to their customers. would Android be where it is today in the US if Verizon hadn't pushed it so hard before they got the iPhone? Carriers don't have nearly the same influence over tablets, and most people don't and won't buy tablets from their carriers anyway."

I agree that this is the current state, do you have reason to believe it won't change? Certainly it seems that people are pushing to change it. Can you talk more about your reasoning that leads you to the conclusion that carriers will also control an individual's communications infrastructure?

You make this claim "I'm just saying that the smartphone market is sufficiently different from the tablet market that arguing for Android tablets vs iPad by citing Android phones vs iPhone isn't very convincing."

I certainly agree that "the smartphone market is different from the tablet market" today but back in the last century I witnessed a similar transformation in the computer market. I don't know if it will resonate with you but allow me to share it.

In the 70's a "Computer" was a big machine that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, had a large staff to maintain it, and was so costly to run that keeping it 100% utilized the was goal of every owner to maximize the value.

Computers were controlled by a few big names which can be stand ins for "carriers" in your smartphone argument. Along came companies could build you a computer for a few tens of thousands of dollars, that were expensive for individuals but cheap for departments. They were typically called "mini-computers" and there were some upstarts named Digital Equipment Corporation, Prime, and Data General Corporation who were disruptive forces.

Then microcomputers came out, they were toys. It was a completely different market, you played games on them or used them like oversized adding machines, sufficiently different from the "real" computer market that they were in a space all by themselves.

The microcomputers eventually displaced 99% of the computing needs of individuals and businesses. Because computation and data handling, were the fundamental "product" that people used, not "computers", "mini-computers", or "microcomputers".

I see the players in the smartphone market, attacking the big players the same way the mini-computers attacked mainframes. A smartphone is just like a feature phone, except it also can do internet things and run applications. Now we have tablets and they are more like laptops than phones (although you can make phone calls on them too) and they are coming at the market from the other side. But what all of these pieces of gear have in common is that they are the communication tools we use in our day to day lives to keep up to date, and communicate with our friends, colleagues, and family. Its not difficult to see that one could build a tablet that easily included phone calling features, accessed via a hands free headset that were both more robust and more useful than today's 'smartphone'.

Because I see analogies in the computer revolution with the current phone/smartphone/tablet phenomena, I'm inclined to feel that companies that can be disruptive in the smart phone market can be disruptive in the tablet market as well. It was of course the capitulation of IBM in 1981 with the release of the IBM PC that signaled the beginning of the end for mid-range computers, perhaps we'll see a similar capitulation with tablets by a phone vendor. The addressable market is larger so there is more money at stake. And when carrying a tablet means you don't have to carry any printed matter it becomes a net benefit to many professionals to prefer a tablet with phone call capability over a smart phone.

So my claim is that the communications market, of which smart phones and tablets are both participants, will become much more homogenized in the future (perhaps to the point where no one bothers to break them out) and that in such a market, technical performance and choice will be the dominant variables in driving market penetration. Android wins handily over iOS when it comes to "choice", so by my reasoning if the technical performance was there to meet or exceed the contemporary offering from Apple, it will have greater market share, in spite of a less refined UX.