Video: Hands-on with Apple's new 9.7-inch iPad for education
Tablets may have been introduced as minimalist laptop alternatives that specialized in a few broad tasks, but those days are long in their past.
Rather, there's been a wide range of efforts to play up their value, as they've been assaulted from the low-end by ever-encroaching smartphones. As I noted in reviewing the portable computing announcements at CES, many of the Windows players emphasized convertible laptops[1] instead of detachable tablets.
Read also: How Apple, Google, and Microsoft stack up in education[2]
But that may say more about Windows than tablets. More recently, four major companies introduced new tablets not based on Windows. Of these, only the Huawei Android models[3] -- which will be tricky to come by in the US -- were brought to market with little more than the traditional value proposition for a broad offering. Their main takeaway, borne out by other announcements, is that 8-inch and 10-inch tablets now represent the sweet spot of the tablet market. The former represents the upper practical limit of one-handed use, while the latter provides a balance of portability and screen real estate that somewhat shields tablets from laptop competition.
Review: Huawei MediaPad M5 Pro: A decent Android tablet, but it's no iPad[4]

Indeed, the other three tablets that were announced last month have also adhered to those screen size ranges. Let's start with Acer Chromebook Tab 10[5], the first Chrome-based slate, coming in at an iPad-sized 9.7-inch.[6] With Chrome OS first gaining support for touchscreens and then support for Android, the operating system has