The surprising iPad rival in education that isn't a tablet-Priceangels.com

If you've been tracking education tablet deployments over the course of the last 12 months, you'll have seen that business is booming for vendors.iPad roll-outs have varied from the hundreds to the thousands, with the L.A. school district recently agreeing to fork over $30 million to deploy 35,000 iPads.

There has also been a pick-up in demand for newest android tablet, especially from Dell, and even News Corp's Amplify is having some early success, with it due to roll-out a massive 23,000 Android tablets to the North Carolina school district.“A Chromebook cannot do everything that a Windows PC or a Mac (of even a Linux PC) can do. It can’t even do everything that a tablet can do. For one thing, the selection of games is very limited though there is, of course, Angry Birds,” wrote seasoned tech journalist Steve Wildstrom recently for Tech-pinions.

In theory, it’s a choice for lots of tablet buyers: Do you get the iPad, or Kindle Fire, or whatever, with a wireless data connection, or without one?But in reality, for most tablet buyers, it’s a non-issue. They are overwhelmingly buying tablets that have only Wi-Fi connections. Which means they can only get online when they’re within shouting distance of a router.

Analyst Craig Moffett spells it out in a recent research report on the telco industry: Only 20 percent of tablets are sold with wireless chipsets. And only half of those devices are initially connected to wireless networks. And Moffett guesstimates that perhaps half of that number end up disconnecting their wireless subscriptions (which is what happened in my focus group of one). Which would mean that only one in 20 tablets are connected to a wireless data plan.ds4324SG

But the numbers are also useful for people in the media business to consider as they think about where and when tablet owners are actually interacting with the Internet. Yes, it’s possible that someone is accessing your website on their iPad when they’re in the middle of a field.Its Nook tablets also are having a hard time competing with iPads and Android-based tablets such as Amazon’s Kindle. In fact, Barnes & Noble recently said it would stop making its own tablets and will instead concentrate on its e-readers. Its shares were down more than 4 percent to $17.80 as of this post.

If you didn’t think there was a market for Android Q88 Android Tablet designed specifically for kids, it appears Fuhu has been finding some level of success in this area. It was late last year they released a follow up to their original kiddie tab, the 7-inch Nabi 2 sporting a 7-inch display and Tegra 3 processor. Fuhu called it “the fastest, most powerful tablet in the world made just for kids.” They even followed up with a 10-inch version dubbed Nabi XD, this time marketed for the ever growing “tween” market.

Looks like Fuhu is just getting started, as today we discovered a new trademark filed with the USPTO for an all new tablet calling itself the “Nabi Dream Tab.” Other than the name, not much info was given, but with their kiddie and tween bases covered, we’re wondering if Fuhu isn’t ready to break out of the kid-tab market, and into something a little more high-end. With a name like “Dream Tab,” I got to thinking: what exactly would make your “dream” tablet?