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Apple's headstart in the tablets market is giving the vendor a blissful honeymoon period in this market, where it has accounted for 95% of sales in the third quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. Credible competitors will emerge for the holiday season, so its share will be squeezed in Q4 - but it will still gain two-thirds of sales, according to a forthcoming report from Rethink Technology Research. In 2011, though, it faces the prospect of a Google attack, similar to that in smartphones, but this time riding on two operating systems - Android and the 'cloudbook' platform, Chrome OS. First products running this new Google system are expected to debut before year end.

Chrome OS puts most of the functions of the conventional operating system into the browser, which then runs on a cutdown Linux platform. This should provide optimized running of web and cloud services, and support emerging developer standards like HTML5, as well as the cloud-oriented user behaviors that are biting at downloads and local processing/storage.

The new platform is on the verge of commercial deployment, according to Taiwanese report DigiTimes, which said the island's device manufacturers are putting the final touches to Chrome OS tablets or cloudbooks, which would indicate shipment in late November or December. The first big name launches are expected to come from Acer and Hewlett-Packard, indicating that the initial cloudbook wave will be led by the PC community, seeking a substitute for the declining netbook category, while the vendors from a cellphone heritage will focus, for now at least, on the iPad-style tablet. Some cloudbooks are expected to have keyboards, making them more responsive netbooks.

One rumor says that, undeterred by the failure of its foray into hardware with Nexus One, Google will launch its own-branded Chrome OS device. This might be - like the putative Nexus Two - primarily a way to showcase the user experience and gain developer support (a commercialized version of Intel's concept designs), rather than an attempt to compete with established OEMs or carrier models, bids that clearly failed with Nexus One.

Google has only said it will release Chrome OS and the associated Chrome OS Web Store in the fall.

Its new platform could fragment the tablet/cloudbook segment from 2011, though if Microsoft wants to play, it needs to allow OEMs to run Windows Phone 7 on non-handset devices, rather than insisting on full-blown Windows 7, as it does now. This is missing an opportunity - several vendors have praised WP7 and said they think it will suit the highly mobile nature of many tablet designs better than full Windows. Dell is said to be one of the OEMs lobbying for large-screen support for WP7, as it readies a 7-inch Android device to run alongside its 5-inch Streak tablet/smartphone hybrid.

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