At this year’s Mobile World Summit held in Barcelona in February, around 280 new tablet products were announced, with 278 based on the Android operating system, one from Apple, and one from BlackBerry.

That doesn’t include the current range of products on offer from dozens of vendors including Samsung and Apple. Lenovo, one of the largest notebook manufacturers in the world, has just announced they plan to launch their own range of tablets later this year.

Dell are already sprooking their tablet range. It seems every hardware vendor on the planet is rushing to launch a tablet product, in the hope of cashing in on the anticipated tidal wave of consumer buying frenzy.

Michel Dell, Founder and CEO of Dell, seems to share the same view as me. In a recent interview, Mr Dell said “What’s interesting [is that] business users are not going to give up smartphones, won’t give up PCs.

So now you have a PC, you have a smartphone and you have a tablet.” With PC sales falling alarmingly in recent times and the tablet market starting to gather serious momentum, Dell and other hardware vendors need to hedge their bets with this new white-hot hardware category.

Lucky for them they don’t have to build a complete software platform ecosystem; Android provides all the operating system and apps they need to get to market fast.