LAS VEGAS—So apparently the "phablet" is a thing now. At CES Toshiba showed off a 5-inch phone/tablet hybrid concept to join Samsung's 5.3-inch Galaxy Note in the giant-phone world, along with a slim 7-inch tablet and a giant 13.3-inch tablet concept for in-home use.
Toshiba cautioned that all three of these tablets are concepts: they may or may not come to market depending on Toshiba's future market research. The company is exploring the range of potential tablet sizes to see what will work well, reps said.
The 5-inch Toshiba Muse (that's an official code name) is a "phablet" (not Toshiba's word), a combination phone/tablet with a super-wide 21-by-9-inch screen. The screen is an unusual shape, so the Muse can be narrow enough to comfortably fit in one hand, and it does. It's much more comfortable to hold than the Samsung Galaxy Note. Held in portrait mode, the Android 4.0 device's screen will show a long list of e-mails, for instance; in landscape mode it works well with widescreen movies, or as a gaming device with room for a gamepad on the side of the screen.
Yeah, yeah, I know there have been other phablets over the years. At past CES and Mobile World Congress shows, we saw the Acer Iconia Smart and LG GW990, both of which were pretty huge phones. You could also throw the old HTC Advantage into the mix. But I feel that this year, there seems to be a strange momentum behind phablets, driven by Samsung's marketing machine. We'll have to see if the phablets take over at Mobile World Congress next month.
Then there's the 13.3-inch monster. This tablet isn't a one-handed device by any means; it looks a bit like a serving tray, and it feels like it weighs over two pounds. Toshiba has gotten a lot of requests from both Japanese and U.S. consumers for a bigger tablet, reps said.
The unnamed beast's 1,600-by-900 screen works for group gaming and movie-watching, and it'll have four speakers, two on top and two on the bottom. The tablet has ten-point multitouch, so it's prepared for several different people to poke at it at once when it's sitting on a coffee table; think of multiplayer board games, for instance. It might also have a cradle or dock available to turn it into a laptop or desktop PC form factor.
That ties into an upcoming trend I see, especially as Windows 8 hits the market later this year: the current "ultrabook" market will get a lot of two-piece products like the Asus eee Pad Transformer Prime, which will work as straight slate tablets but snap together with a keyboard and ports to become a laptop alternative.
All of the new tablets I saw at the show will come out in the second half of the year, if at all; they don't have prices yet, or even for that matter fixed specs. We're sure to learn more at Mobile World Congress next month.