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MAKER OF SHINY DRINKS TRAYS Apple took a tablet market share of 85 per cent with its Ipad in 2010, according to a report by ABI Research.

The not all too surprising dominance of the Ipad mostly boils down to the fact that there wasn’t much competition in 2010. The Ipad launched in April of last year, taking the world by storm, and rivals were caught flat-footed and had to play catchup for the rest of the year as they scrambled to release tablets of their own.

Of those rivals, Samsung performed best, with its Android-based Galaxy Tab coming in second place to the Ipad. This still only represented a market share of eight per cent, however, which was nowhere near enough to give Apple a real run for its money.

Archos came in third with a market share of a paltry two per cent. Its Android tablets are generally much cheaper than the competition, but lower cost hasn’t seemed to equate with success so far in the tablet game.

The lack of the tablet oriented Honeycomb release of Android was also a factor in how little market share Ipad rivals gained in 2010, but that is likely to change over the course of 2011 as wave after wave of competing tablets enter the market.

“Many new entrants are looking to differentiate themselves from the 0+ [price tag] of the iPad, so low-feature and low-cost designs will become common,” said Jeff Orr, senior practice director at ABI Research. “We expect between 40 and 50 million media tablets to ship worldwide in 2011.”

He added that the hype about tablets replacing portable computers ended up not becoming a reality. He also expects demand for tablets to level off between 2015 and 2016. Apple will probably have launched the Ipad 7 by then. µ

Honestly, Roku's price drop and yesterday's announcement of Hulu Plus coming to the platform probably stole much if any remaining thunder from the imminent arrival of the new Apple TV. While we'll still give the Apple TV a thorough treatment, it's still clearly a very niche product from Apple (until it gets jailbroken, then all bets are off). It's one of the easiest devices to test simply because it doesn't work with the vast majority of downloadable video content. We can't even run our media streamer test suite on the device since it doesn't  support streaming anything outside of iTunes.

To tide you over until our review is done however we've got a full gallery of the new Apple TV dissected. There aren't many surprises installed. The thing is tiny, there are no fans and the entire chassis is used as a heatsink. Apple makes liberal use of thermal conductive pads within the device. 

The new ATV does use the A4, but the markings on the chip in my unit are very feint so I couldn't tell how much memory was integrated onto the package. There don't seem to be many other surprises inside, the new Apple TV is a iPod Touch without the display and speaker/mic. The real potential for this platform (much like its predecessor) is realized if/when it's hacked. Until then it'll be a tough sell for many. Update: Looks like it has already been jailbroken (thanks crimson117), it's just a matter of time for folks to put the freedom to good use.

Check out the gallery!

Here at IDF, Intel has been promoting the Atom platform pretty heavily, with the new dual core Atom N550 and all of the new Moorestown-based chips like the CE4200 and E6xx series. They’ve been demoing quite a few of the latest netbooks and tablets from their partners, including the OpenPeak Moorestown device we looked at on Monday, but for the most part the devices have been running Pine Trail, like the WeTab from yesterday's keynote.

Read on to see more of what Intel has been showing off on the show floor.

We’re currently down in San Jose, California covering NVIDIA’s annual GPU Technology Conference. While we're only covering the final 2 days of the conference, on Tuesday NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the company's next two GPUs: Kepler and Maxwell. Due in late 2011 and 2013 respectively, these will be the next GPU families for the company and will be their major 28nm and 22nm products. At this point NVIDIA isn't telling us more more than the name and the expected double precision floating point performance, but it's certainly a start. Read on for more information.

The Intel Developer Forum kicked off today with a keynote by Intel CEO Paul Otellini in San Francisco. Intel's focus in today's keynote has threefold. First, the change in the chipmaker's focus from being exclusively a chip company, to a much more comprehensive computing solutions provider. Second, the new three pillars of computing that Intel sees for continuing computing growth – including a comprehensive look at WiDi, and finally Sandy Bridge which Anand just covered . 

We just left the keynote floor, read on for more coverage.

Last week Apple announced a complete overhaul of its iPod lineup including a new Shuffle, a new Nano (with multitouch screen) and a new iPod Touch. While the nano looks cool, it’s pricey and honestly I haven’t been interested in a dedicated MP3 player in about a decade.

The new iPod Touch however piqued my interest. With many of the same specs as the iPhone 4, I wondered if the new Touch might be a neat way to get most of the functionality of the 4 without the albatross of a contract AT&T hangs around your neck.

It turns out there’s a lot more than a cellular radio that separates the new iPod Touch from the iPhone 4.

For the first time since its introduction in 2005 Apple has significantly updated the design of the Mac mini. The new model is thinner, although it requires a bit more surface area. Basically a 13-inch MacBook Pro without the display, this new 9 Mac promises to be the most energy efficient desktop on the market. We look at its performance, power consumption and even compare it to a five year old Power Mac G5 to see how well Apple's mini update holds up.

Read on for the full review.

Earlier this year Apple updated its entire MacBook Pro lineup. The update wasn't cosmetic, the 2nd generation unibody design carried over from 2009. Instead the 15-inch and 17-inch notebooks got Core i5/i7 CPUs paired with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M GPUs. The 13-inch model was left with a Core 2 Duo and only saw a big improvement in GPU spec with the integrated GeForce 320M.

Clearly valuing a consistent GPU experience over a faster CPU, Apple decided to keep the Core i-family of CPUs out of its most popular MacBook Pro. As a result the new MacBook Pro offers roughly twice the 3D gaming performance of its predecessor, but only a small improvement in CPU performance. The standard memory size is now doubled to a respectable 4GB.

Battery life has also improved pretty significantly. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro now offers the best battery life in Apple's entire lineup. In our light web browsing test we measured a full 9.75 hours of battery life on a single charge. Our worst case scenario? 3.56 hours.

Check out our full review for everything from battery life to display quality and thermals.

Another year, another Computex.  Every time it comes around, vendors attempt to tease and tantalise both journalists and Joe Public alike with concept models, previews, machines running really fast, and the ubiquitous booth attendants holding motherboards upside down.  As part of our motherboard coverage here at AnandTech, rather than post separate news articles for each motherboard, we've had a look through what Computex 2010 had to offer, including current and to-be-released products, and got facts straight from the manufacturers where possible.