The iPad 2 launches today and with it comes a bevy of reviews, comparisons, and predictions for the coming year of tablet technology. So, I’ve been thinking, with so many new tablets coming out this year and so much new technology on the horizon, what can we look forward to seeing, not next year, but two or three years down the road?

Quad Core Processing

We’ve already seen the first few mobile quad cores floating around out there. Asus will release a quad core tablet this year, with 3D output to boot. Others are preparing their own quad core offerings for release in 2012 or 2013. The arms race isn’t so much for the fastest processor but for the most well rounded (and affordable device), so when the speed is there without the cost, we will see a surge in speedier chips.

For now, we can enjoy the line of new Tegra 2 chips and Apple’s A5. In the next year or two, things will be even faster – but more importantly, what will people do with that power?

Battery Life

Right now, there isn’t much argument over battery life. A 10 hour capacity is considered respectable, and has been the standard since the original iPad launched last year, but it will eventually increase. More importantly, heavy duty tablets that run Windows need to start using more energy efficient ARM processors, something Windows 7 does not currently support and that hurts the mobile longevity of those tablets.

Will we see a battery life improvement by 2013? It would definitely be nice. Imagine being able to use your tablet on an entire 15+ hour international flight – we’re almost there.

The Enterprise

While the consumer market is still booming, the enterprise is just getting started with tablets. In 2011, companies across the globe will test the newest tablet PCs on the market and decide which ecosystem is best for them. With so many too choose from, the current lead by Apple may not be permanent. The BlackBerry Playbook especially stands to gain quite a bit in market share if only because it plugs directly into the existing 250,000 BlackBerry servers.

Security, cloud support, mobile operations and in-house upgrades and installations will all drive innovation in this field as tablets become a major part of the enterprise.

Connectivity

Right now we are transitioning between 3G and 4G mobile networks. At the same time WiFi is becoming more prevalent in almost every corner of the globe. Tablets can stay connected 24/7 with the right technology.

In the next two years, that technology will expand and be improved upon to allow everything from document collaboration to online gaming, and advanced video conferencing capabilities – tablets will soon take on an entirely new role because of connectivity alone.

But this is only the start. There are so many things that tablet computers can and will do in the future, it’s almost impossible to guess where they will go next. Will 3D technology add to the next generation of tablet PCs or will convertible tablets bridge a gap between netbooks and touch devices? It’s impossible to tell just yet.

What do you think? What will drive tablet growth and interest in the next two years (or longer)? Is this truly a computing renaissance or will things cool down soon as market demand tempers?

Two major rumors in the last week have me thinking about ecosystem viability and what it means for tablet PCs in the next year or two. The first rumor was a potential game changer as a video surfaced (via CrackBerry) of a Playbook demo in which an RIM representative can be overheard saying the PlayBook will support Android Apps. It’s not the first rumor of this sort, but it’s the first one to come directly from RIM (even unconfirmed).

The other rumor is that Microsoft’s newest operating system – Windows 8 – won’t be ready for tablet integration until the second half of 2012. With recent rumors pinning the development of Windows 8 around build 3 and a beta likely to be released this summer, the timing seems about right (though possibly a bit earlier in 2012 than some people think). That’s a long time to wait to get into a market that is starting to boom as we speak.

Both rumors (and the reaction of writers to them) point to one thing – the market can only support so many development ecosystems. It’s not so much about the people who buy these devices. If the Apps and hardware are there, people will buy any number of different operating systems.

That’s not the problem. The problem is that when there are too many options, developers tend to shift resources to those platforms that are the most profitable – in this case iOS and Android. RIM seems to be at least contemplating that as they don’t deny rumors of Android support on the Playbook. And while this is a great way to drive sales, it will probably further deflate the Playbook development community. Why would a developer produce two apps – one for Android and one for Playbook – when they could just as easily create only an Android app?

On the other side of the coin, Microsoft is still playing catch up, and unfortunately they are doing it slowly. It’s sad to see a company that was so much at the front end of tablet PC development fall so far behind the curve. By the time they release their first tablet specific OS, if Windows 8 is tablet specific, the iPad will have been on the market for two full years with a third generation device just having launched (if it follows Apple’s normal development cycle).

Android will have had a full year to propagate on new tablets and there will be at least two other major players on the market in the Playbook and HP’s WebOS. If Windows 8 was released right now, it would be a little late to the party. By 2012, the party might be moved somewhere else entirely.

This is a new age of ecosystem sales. People don’t just buy devices – they buy the experience those devices offer. And the more people buy into the iOS and Android experiences, the less likely any of them will shift to a new model, especially developers who make so much money with the current offerings.

Of course, things can change. We don’t know what Windows 8 for tablets will look like. Deep integration with a desktop, advanced handwriting support, a centralized app store, actual ARM support for longer battery life – these are all features that could help Microsoft’s new offering succeed. But, will it be too little too late? That remains to be seen.