What is a tablet?
A tablet is an ultra-thin device equipped with a full color sensor display. Text can be input there by means of a detached physical keyboard, a virtual keyboard, a voice recognition or a handwriting recognition program. You can work on it with the help of your fingers or with a stylus. So a traditional keyboard and a mouse are not necessary.
There are so-called tablet PCs and other tablet computers. Among the latter one can sort out such narrowly specialized devices as e-readers (e. g. Kindle) or PDAs. Their main difference from tablet PCs is that it’s impossible to install additional applications there.
Today when we say “a tablet” we more often mean the iPad. But the iPad is not the only tablet device. At a point in time when the iPad was released, there was known that other manufacturers also conduct active job on the various projects of tablet devices. So, today there are many other tablets, besides the iPad, at different stages of development – from just announced ones to already developed but not yet launched, and most of them running Google’s Android OS.