MANILA, Philippines – Last week saw Steve Jobs taking a break from his medical leave to launch his company’s first update of the iPad. As usual, Apple showed the world who’s boss when it comes to marketing and doing product launches.

The iPad 2’s coming put a lot of damper on the Motorola Xoom tablet’s parade. Suddenly, the slate that was poised to seriously compete with the iPad is reduced into a second-rate copycat by the iPad 2. Bummer.

And if the 2011 CES best product could not hold a candle to the iPad 2, where would the rest of the tablets go?
The Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal both think the lesser-known tablet brands will certainly compete on price. And, frankly, this corner does not see any reason to disagree.
 
Samsung Fears iPad 2

In fact, this early, Samsung has admitted it faces some serious challenge in finding ways to compete with Apple’s revised iPad. After all, the iPad 2 comes with a thinner body (about two-thirds thinner than its predecessor), and is also thinner than Samsung’s latest 10.9mm Galaxy tablet. Lee Don-Joo, Samsung’s EVP of its mobile division, said that his company has to improve the Galaxy’s parts that are not as capable as they should be.

To illustrate the Korean company’s problem: Samsung has sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs since October 2010. Apple sold 15 million iPad slates from April to December of last year.
 
China’s Original Supercomputer

China recently introduced a supercomputer made exclusively from locally made components. The Dawning 6000 supercomputer was announced by chip designer Weiwu Hu at the International Solid State Circuits Conference held in San Francisco earlier this month.

With a clock speed of 300 teraflops, the all-original Chinese supercomputer will go online in summer 2011. It runs Linux.
 
Packaging and PC Case

PC vendor Asus has started selling motherboards that come in carton packaging that consumers can use as cases for their self-assembled home PCs. The concept offers consumers the opportunity to do their share for an environment-friendly PC market.

It reduces potential landfill load by cutting on the volume of packaging materials, which usually end up as waste.

Of course, it might not be ideal for PCs designed for heavy use, and consequently prone to overheating. But for the usual designed-for-the-home PCs, this could work.

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.