You've read the good news, unless you arrived here by a different route, now here's the not-so-good.
There are still significant problems to be overcome before we can revel in healthy tablet competition. While few expected real progress in all the areas below, in the run-up to the Android tablet's second Christmas we are disappointed at the number of major stumbling blocks yet to be overcome.
There were two tablets widely rumoured to be showcasing Android's new unified Ice Cream Sandwich platform: the Asus Transformer Prime and the Motorola Xoom 2. In the last few days these have now been formally launched ,but with the older Honeycomb release of Android. It's probably too late now for them to get their Ice Cream Sandwich "goodness" in time for Christmas. This really is quite a big miss.
The most promising tablet entering the market for Christmas this year - the Amazon Kindle Fire - is not going to be on sale outside the US. The contracts outside the US to support its complex ecosystem of videos and ebooks are not sorted yet.
There's still no clear retail path which can help Android to challenge the iPad which is sold through Apple's beautiful shops. This matters for tablets more than for Android phones because the cellular providers pushed the phones to sell more contracts. Tablets are often sold without an ongoing contract.
The Honeycomb version of Android never got its source code release, unlike the earlier versions of platform. This was quite a worry for open-source fans. To set our minds at rest, the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) code release would have been reassuring. It could come any day, but it hasn't happened yet.
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The most promising tablet entering the market for Christmas this year - the