Since before the launch of the iPad, we have heard rumor after rumor about tablets about to hit the market. Time and again, these rumors proved to be just that… rumors, and we’ve seen nothing. The amazing sales figures of the iPad have overshadowed all the manufacturers and models that never arrived. Companies like Microsoft and HP are two of the most notable companies with phantom tablets.

It is no surprise that after the unprecedented success of the iPad, that surprised even the biggest optimists, competitors want to get back in on the newest and hottest hardware platform.

Toshiba announced its Libretto which is a hybrid machine that has the form factor of a netback, replacing the physical keyboard with a second touchscreen and adding an accelerometer. 

Cisco is capitalizing on the iPad’s biggest shortcoming. Of all the demographics gobbling up the iPad faster than Apple can have them made, the enterprise is the slowest of the bunch. Let’s face facts, the iPad’s strong suit is not its business performance. Sure you can get the iWork suite or DocumentsToGo and you can connect to an Exchange server but the iPad is not build for the enterprise. Cisco plans to  fill that hole wit the Cius (pronounced See us?) next year. It will sport a front and rear facing camera and do full video teleconferencing. It will be priced below $1,000 and be aimed at businesses.

The latest entry is LG. There is not much information as of press time. We do know, however, that it will be powered by Android, which should not be much of a surprise to anyone.

Microsoft remains quiet and after the failure of the Kin, needs to get into the mobile space in a big way so maybe we will hear form them in regards to a tablet.

In the few months that have been 2010, we have heard some big claims from a variety of companies. Google will be offering ISP services, IBM is replacing copper inside the machine with light. Apple wants to redefine mobile computer. Today we have yet another groundbreaking headline. And it comes from a usually media quiet company - Cisco.

They announced CRS-3 which is a new routing system that will take over for the CRS-1 predecessor. Aptly names, the CRS-3 is three times faster than the 2004 CRS-1 in use today and 12 times faster than Jupiter, its nearest competitor. Unlike the earlier referenced announcements, this will not impact the end user in any way when it comes to buying new equipment or updating any behaviors. This is a backbone issue and is currently being tested by AT&T. On a side note, the timing is perfect for AT&T, whose network was already buckling under the strain data hungry iPhone users only to be further taxed by iPad usage in just about 30 days.

What is three times faster? How does this relate? Here are some stats given to us by Cisco in terms of what can be done:

- the entire printed Library of Congress can be downloaded in just over a second.

- every man, woman and child in China (which, incidentally, is a third of the world’s population) can place a video call - simultaneously

- every motion picture every made can be streamed in less than four minutes.

Streaming video and downloading of large files has been eating into the bandwidth for a long time and John Chambers, CEO of Cisco says that it will continue to grow “200-500 percent per year.”

The CRS-3 will push up to 322 Terabits per second, but AT&T is currently, successfully, testing 100 Gigabits per second between New Orleans and Miami.

Cisco realized a need for much faster backbones and has more than conceptualized a solution. It is not only working in theory but in field testing as well. It has even been given a price tag to possible telecom customers starting at $90,000.

We have machines capable of processing so much data and the bottleneck is at the link. Simply put, we cannot feed information into our machines fast enough and they are often waiting while the processor runs millions of empty cycles. In corporate terms, that equals millions of dollars that could be made if the information was there to be processed. This is a major step toward remedying that problem.

With the ability to download the entire library of congress in less than one second, it is safe to say that information will always be at the ready.