Last year may have been the first chance for punters to have the new wave in tablet computers under their Christmas trees, but this was the year it really got interesting.

Even as laptop computers chugged along in their boring but reliable way – what else is there to say about an industry where the most exciting trend is the release of burnished-aluminium 'ultrabooks' – the biggest mobility trend during 2011 was the prevalence of these tablets. Still dominated by Apple’s iPad, the market was a haven for dead-pool fans as myriad vendors tried and failed to topple the company's market dominance even as it reset the technology expectation of consumers, employees and businesses alike.

HP’s TouchPad fire sale may have seized the record for the shortest consumer-electronics launch ever and Dell’s discontinuation of its 7-inch Streak 7 tablet the lowest-profile mercy killing – but the slow, plodding train wreck that is Research In Motion (RIM) is the biggest example of how the iPad has turned the market on its head, forcing market Goliaths to reconsider their strategies and push out of their comfort zones.

In RIM’s case, the push into tablets was constrained by its legacy in providing business-focused smartphones. RIM tried to add the word ‘play’ to the name of its PlayBook in order to give it consumer nous, but the decision to tether the device to RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones, and to deliver the device without email capabilities of its own, proved just as popular in the market as many punters initially thought it would.

Although vendors such as Acer have scored a few hits with bulk deals to schools like Brighton Grammar, Apple continues to dominate the market and – I think – is likely to do so through 2012. And there is a simple reason for this: by serving consumers a high-quality product and uncompromising content ecosystem, Apple has wormed its way into the sensibilities of consumers and, almost through osmosis, has seen the iPad drawn up into ever-higher visibility within the corporate world.

IT managers, as a consequence, have been caught scrambling to figure out how the iPad changes the mobility equation; the saving grace, perhaps, is that iPads run the same operating system as iPhones so devices running them can be managed using a similar mobile device management (MDM) infrastructure. Good thing, too: recent figures suggest Aussies are swarming towards tablets.

I have not yet mentioned Samsung, of course, but I have not in any way forgotten it. This whole ugly patent stoush between Apple and Samsung was the most sensational thing to happen in the tablet market during 2011, but I regard as bizarre reports that Samsung has somehow “won” the battle by being able to offer its Galaxy Tab 10.1 for sale before Christmas.

Apple never needed to ban the Galaxy Tab permanently; all it needed to do was delay the device so long that it missed the key Christmas market – which is largely has. For all its apparent goodness (and I have not, to be open and honest, used one yet) the emergence of Google’s ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ Android update means the Galaxy Tab is an expensive device that’s running an outdated operating system and will soon be swamped by a crush of ICS-based devices.

Whatever beauty the device may have had, will fall by the wayside next year when ICS spawns a new rush on Android tablets – and, presumably, brings an updated version of the Android Kindle Fire to our shores. Combined with a do-or-die Windows 8-based effort by Nokia – which will likely be too little, too late – and the emergence of the Pad 3, which by definition cannot be too little or too late, and next year’s mobility market will be interesting indeed.

Of course, there is a wildcard in the form of Motorola, which has managed to get the iPad and iPhone banned in Europe on the basis of a yet-to-be-resolved patent claim. This sort of Mexican standoff is stunning irony and could be disastrous for everyone in the mobility market: love it or hate it, Apple’s tablet market is suckling at the teat of Apple’s iPad supply chain – particularly in Australia where iPads are increasing their market share at the expense of Android tablets. Were a patent suit to interrupt this flow, the follow-on effects would be both dramatic and problematic.

Samsung could take advantage of the disruption to make up for lost time: as a huge player in Android and a massive consumer-electronics operator, it has the same customer-friendly focus that Apple has developed over time. This should prevent it making the blunders of HP, RIM or Dell in producing boring devices that nobody really wants. But even as standard-bearer for Android tablets, there are great questions about whether Samsung can convince the buying public to abandon the iPad en masse.

In the longer term, there are equally significant questions as to whether enterprises will allow consumers to bring any old tablet into their working environments, especially as a replacement for long-proven laptop finance options. Tablets will disrupt corporate mobility planning in many ways, and keeping up with the changes will remain a key challenge for IT managers moving forward.

But that’s another story – or, as the case may be, another year of Carry blogs. In the meantime, have a wonderful holiday season and here’s wishing you all the best for the new year – no matter which tablet you buy. As one friend recently told me: as long as it plays Angry Birds, I’m good.

I noted with great interest the decision by Melbourne-area private boys' school Brighton Grammar to adopt 600 Acer Android tablets across its entire year 9 through 12 student body.

Here, Android supporters everywhere have rejoiced, is a school finally willing to flip the bird to that bastion of market dominance, Apple, and give its constituency of teenage boys a tablet that has all the Flash-watching, malware-exposed, multimedia goodness that Android's Honeycomb version can dish up.

This is all well and good, but it also highlights the lemming syndrome that's happening within many of our schools. Determined as always to position themselves as educational leaders, schools of all stripes are investing – largely in iPads, but some in Iconia Tab A500s – in tablets that will, it is presumed, magically improve learning outcomes for all concerned.

A pity they're being used for exactly none of that. I recently heard a report of one school that bought a number of iPads for its students, then had distressed teachers calling a meeting two weeks later after one of the units had developed a crack in its screen.

Turns out the boys were filling it with downloaded games, taking goofy photos of each other using Photo Booth, and tossing the unit to each other in a pique of monkey-in-the-middle play that went horribly wrong when the $1000 device made hard contact with an even harder floor.

While this sort of thing may offer new fun in the form of school-tablet dead pools, it's also a reflection of just what questionable technology decisions are being taken. As to why the school didn't think to invest in $40 covers to protect their devices, I cannot say.

The Brighton Grammar crew thought of covers, at least. Yet indications are that they're off to an equally ignominious start: look closely at the promotional photos distributed with the announcement of the deal, and you see one of the boys is playing Angry Birds.

In the library. In his school uniform, during school hours (which we can determine from the clock on the wall).

The other boys are engaged in even less educationally-relevant pursuits: one is idly flipping through the applications on the Android home screen, another is typing something into a non-specific application, and the fourth – whose screen we cannot see – could for all we know be tapping into the Iconia's Flash capabilities to watch a bit of streaming pr0n. After all, these are teenage boys we're talking about here; heck, even I was a teenage boy once, and I know what I would have been doing with a tablet like this if we had them back then.

Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought the library was for actual learning – and that schools should only invest in new technology if they have some real educational goal with it. Investing tens of thousands of dollars in new tablets, then proclaiming yourself enlightened as you hand them to teenagers and expecting them to go off and use it to learn something, is like giving that teenager the keys to your Ferrari and telling him he can only pull it into the driveway while you're overseas.

Were I the principal of Brighton Grammar, I would have been horrified to see a press release go out with pictures of the students playing Angry Birds; parents pay good money for strong learning outcomes, but I don't think this is what they had in mind. Schools are going gaga for tablets, but without educating teachers about how to use them there's simply no point.

Worse still, in some cases I fear the rush to tablets will compromise overall education. Consider another local school that has not only mandated iPads for all students, but decreed that all textbooks will now be loaded onto the devices rather than giving students dead-tree editions.

What could possibly go wrong?

This is not to say that tablets can't be used for educational good; only that teachers and educators must make themselves aware of the devices' potential, and develop a real and actionable plan for using them rather than simply being entranced by the amazing power of their gleaming chassis. Companies are the same: rather than being caught up in this vague concept of mobile computing, approach tablet purchases like you were spending your own money – and don't be afraid to hold off if it seems like everyone's just getting a bit to excited about a bit too little.

You have to feel at least a little sorry for Nokia. With Christmas coming up, it finally managed to get its Windows Phone 7-based Lumia 800 smartphone into the market (albeit not in Australia) and show the world that it's serious about reinventing itself. But its serious Christmas play – the long-mooted tablet, which was originally supposed to be based on the sweet but now-binned MeeGo operating system – will actually come next year.

In the short term, Nokia will be all but irrelevant to holiday shoppers as it struggles to not only reinvent itself, but to stay in the minds of ever more demanding smartphone owners who will not forgive the struggling Finnish giant for foisting another tepid mobile platform into the market. These days, shiny and sexy trump brand loyalty every time.

The good news for Nokia: by all accounts, the Lumia 800 is as good as any other WP7 device in the market. The bad: it's not really any better – a fact that led the Huffington Post to call it "so well-built that it is almost a letdown it does not shoot lasers or give back massages… You are paying a premium for design, not performance."

Sound familiar? Critics have been complaining on this last point, but in relation to Apple, for yonks. But they keep buying iPhones and iPads as quickly as Apple can make them. Apparently Nokia still hasn't internalised the need for a device that's as sweet to use as it is to hold.

Can Nokia tap into our collective love of design quickly enough to save itself from financial disaster? Time will tell. But it is now clear that, apart from its nicely designed WP7 phone, Nokia's fortunes in the mobile space rest squarely on a device that nobody has seen and an operating system that may or may not ship next year depending on how Bill Gates' whim is hanging on any given day.

Nokia has a lot riding on its Lumia smartphone line – and a tablet
that may or may not ship in time for anybody to still care.

Yes: rather than shipping real, actual product, Nokia's only offering to the tablet-hungry Christmas market is the vague promise, reported in a French newspaper, that it's aiming to release a Windows 8 tablet by June 2012. It will also, we hear, invade France with a volley of WP7-based smartphones – which are compared to the BMW 3, 5, and 7 series in a presumed nod to their relative cachet.

Microsoft doesn't have the best record when it comes to shipping new OSes on time, but it can ride out delays as it owns its market: Windows 7 is selling extremely well and remains very well-received. Nokia, however, can afford nothing of the sort: its strategic turnaround has already cost it thousands of jobs this year and it can only tap into market goodwill for so long before everybody just gets bored and walks away.

It's already happening: Forrester Research has just warned that "consumer interest [in Win 8] has plummeted.... Windows product strategists will have to overcome several disadvantages associated with being a fifth mover in the tablet market."

Things will get worse before they get better. Remember that by next June, Nokia's wundertablet will almost definitely be competing against the iPad 3 and Samsung Galaxy S III tablets. Nokia needs to not only better existing devices, but to factor likely improvements of these devices if it's ever going to have a hope of relevance.

If Nokia can't get some real traction soon – and I mean the kind that comes from real consumer purchases, not just breathless marketing reveals and drooling paeans from reviewers that would never in a million years actually buy the Lumia 800 over the iPhone or GS2 – it will have to give up on smartphones altogether and focus on selling feature phones by the million in developing economies.

This would, in short, make it not the BMW but the Yugo of the mobile-device industry. Remember the Yugo? That was the Eastern Bloc-built 1980s car that "had a rear-window defroster – reportedly to keep your hands warm while you pushed it". Its fate was as sudden and decisive as that of Yugoslavia itself, which was broken into its component pieces after fractious infighting made it unviable to continue in its current state. Nokia may be praying it's on to a winner with its Windows 8, but by the next Christmas buying season we should know whether the one-time industry Goliath meets the same fate.

Will you buy the mythical Nokia tablet, or the more-tangible Lumia 800? Or is Nokia just a train wreck in motion?

It was the kind of story you’d expect to find published in the April Fool’s Day rush – in fact, I wrote something like it as an April Fool's story last year – but this time Adobe wasn’t joking: after years of pushing Flash as the be-all and end-all solution to portable media applications, Adobe has conceded that it may not actually be the best thing for smartphones and tablets – and has stopped developing new versions of Flash for mobile devices.

Instead, Adobe will support HTML5 – which is a startling change on so many levels, not the least because it vindicates the hostile stance Steve Jobs took against Flash for many years. Flash would be introduced on the iPhone over his dead body, he effectively maintained – but even he probably didn't believe Flash would meet its end just a month after he did.

Tablet makers have made much of Flash support to differentiate their products from the iPad. Does its mobile death lessen the appeal of their devices?

Perhaps the biggest victims of this shift will be the many tablet makers who market Flash compatibility as a major feature of their platforms. I’m not sure how many people have actually not bought an iPad just so they could run Flash applications and Web sites, but Research In Motion, Acer, Motorola and others have been counting on it. In a market where they're already dropping like flies, the loss of Flash will be yet another painful loss.

I’d be interested to know how many bought a non-iPad to run Flash applications and Web sites, then found out the overall experience was troublesome, annoying and crash-prone.

Even for those who found the experience satisfactory, Adobe pulling Flash will leave mobile device makers with one less item on an already slim list of reasons their devices are better than Apple’s. More than anything, however, Adobe’s decision may catalyse the world’s software developers – as well as its authors of annoying and intrusive interactive ads – to read up on HTML5 and consider new ways to reach their mobile target markets. Developers may have baulked at reworking their content for HTML5 in the past, but with Flash sailing into the mobile sunset, they have run out of excuses.

One market that will particularly be crying out for direction is education, where students rely heavily on Flash-driven sites like Mathletics and Club Penguin yet had no compunction embracing iPads in their thousands without regard for the availability, or lack thereof, of Flash. Huge markets like education already weren't buying non-iPads – and now they have even less reason to even consider them.

Flash isn’t entirely dead, of course: it still runs on hundreds of millions of desktop systems, which have both the computing grunt and the interface flexibility to provide the usability we all know and love. But with this significant reversal by Adobe, it appears that yet another part of Steve Jobs' Utopian worldview has fallen into place. With renewed developer and vendor efforts to boost its capabilities, HTML5 will be the ultimate winner.

ss Flash? Did you buy a non-iPad tablet specifically to run Flash apps?

Depending on where you are in your laptop buying cycle, you may or may not have noticed the recent announcements about 'ultrabooks', that extremely thin class of laptop that uses less power, replaces hard drives with solid state drives (SSDs), is made from aluminium, and for all intents and purposes looks and works exactly like an Apple MacBook air.

There's a reason for this, of course: the MacBook air has proved to be an incredibly popular addition to Apple's MacBook laptop range, which has been embraced even by many people who swear they are die-hard Windows enthusiasts. Longer battery life, nearly instant suspension and resumption of sessions, and a sleek design that's to die for have all contributed to the laptops' cachet – so much so that nobody's really been complaining about the removal of DVD-ROM drives.

Even big-name Windows laptop makers, who have in the past kept flooding the market with Blu-ray disc playing units toting massive screens and blink-and-you'll-miss-it battery life, are getting in on the ultrabook story.

Witness ASUS's new ZENBOOK, which I am told will ship this Friday at prices starting from $1399. Like Interestingly, that's $300 more than Apple's entry-level 64GB MacBook air, and $50 more than its comparable 128GB model; so much for the conventional wisdom that Apple laptops are overpriced.

Pricing aside, however, a look at the specs for the ZENBOOK reveal little difference to those of the MacBook air: there are 11 and 13-inch models with 128GB or 256GB SSDs, 5 to 7 hours' battery life, lots of USB, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The keyboard layout, chiclet design, trackpad, and general look and feel scream "Apple" – as do the designs of basically every ultrabook we've seen so far.

If blatantly copying Apple is as innovative as laptop makers can get these days, I'm forced to consider the possibility that the MacBook air has pushed the laptop market towards singularity – that theoretical point where design and functionality have reached their zenith, and where further improvement is simply unattainable.

There will be steady boosts in CPU speed and storage capacity, of course, as sure as the sun rises in the east. But if the main differentiator between the ASUS and Apple laptops is their operating system, where are manufacturers to take this ultrabook form factor next?

More importantly, is there still room in the market for their general-purpose laptop designs?

Will consumers continue flocking to everything-but-the-kitchen-sink units that must be tethered to the nearest mains outlet to power their souped-up GPUs, optical drives and extra-bright screens? Or will they steadily reject that kind of laptop for something that provides real mobility and a full day's worth of computing without gimmicks – in other words, a laptop that just Bloody. Well. Works?

Ultimately, price may be the thing keeping the old-style units alive, since quite a lot of people are happy to buy $500 laptops despite their having disgraceful battery life and questionable build quality that all too often ends in tears. But looks count for a lot – and if there's a higher tier of device hovering just out of reach above that magical $1000 price point, we have to consider the possibility that even low-end buyers will start saving up until they can get an ultrabook in their hands instead.

Fast-forward a few years, and there's only conclusion: every laptop will be – or, at least, look like – a MacBook air. Analysts certainly think so: IHS, for one, recently came out with a prediction that ultrabooks will account for 40 percent of all laptop shipments by 2015.

Unless, of course, someone – and, let's face it, in the laptop market that means Apple – does something radical to reinvent the whole idea of a laptop.

What else would you add to today's laptops? Or have we indeed reached laptop singularity?