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Riding on the coat tails of the interest in iPad, tablets are to enjoy significant growth over the next two years, but they will largely be cannibal devices rather than additional purchases. Analysts at Barclays forecast sales of at least 15m units this year, and 28m in 2011, but at the expense of Windows notebooks and netbooks.

Although, for most people, tablets perform different functions from notebooks, buying one for key advantages like portability and video support may lead users to postpone upgrading a mobile PC, or even do without one. The challenge for vendors of both products will be to ensure the growth category does not drag down overall margins.

"We believe the initial phase of the tablet surge will cannibalize a portion of the notebook category, particularly a chunk of the netbook market and low-end notebook market," Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes wrote.

"Most industry players insist the tablet is incremental but industry data and our checks point out otherwise, especially now at the beginning of the market's formation," Reitzes added, bearing out similar conclusions from a Rethink Research study earlier this year, which found tablets and the upcoming cloudbooks to be almost entirely cannibal in nature. At first the impact was seen on the portable PC sector, but over time it even started to slow upgrades or purchases of high end smartphones - with users instead opting for a midrange handset plus a tablet for advanced web and media functions.

Only a few well promoted tablets have so far come to market, notably the iPad and Dell's Streak, which falls into a hybrid form factor between a tablet and phone, with a 5-inch screen and handset-like user interface. Although some of these devices will run Windows, the main choices outside Apple are likely to be Linux- based, hitting the Microsoft heartland. Hewlett-Packard, which demonstrated a Windows-based Slate device early in the year, is now believed to be reworking it for its newly acquired webOS.

Another Barclays analyst, Israel Hernandez, wrote that this trend "leaves software incumbents (chiefly Microsoft) vulnerable to share losses as consumers are no longer reliant on Windows for their computing needs." Although Google has not yet fully released its browser-as-OS, Chrome OS, Barclays is optimistic for the chances of this platform in the hybrid devices sector. Google will target its system at heavily web-oriented products, dubbed cloudbooks, which could have tablet or keyboard formats.

"We are optimistic on Google's positioning with the Chrome OS given the success of Android in the smartphone space," the research continues."Consumers have clearly shown they are willing to adopt another smartphone operating system." As for the silicon aspect, tablets give a clear opportunity for ARM-based processors to move upmarket from handsets into mobile computers, challenging Intel and particularly Atom, dominant in netbooks. Nvidia Tegra, Qualcomm Snapdragon and Texas Instruments OMAP are singled out as the app processors with the best chances, while Apple and Samsung rely on their own, closely related, ARM-based designs (A4 and Hummingbird respectively).

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