Tegra 2 Tablets Will Be "Absolutely Exquisite" Promises NVIDIA CEO; Galaxy Tab Just "A Large Phone"

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has acknowledged the company's tardiness in entering the tablet market, saying that when it comes to taking on the iPad, "if you're going to give that wonderful product a run for its money, you better build something absolutely exquisite." Speaking during NVIDIA's Q3 2010 earnings call, Huang spent plenty of time talking up next-gen Android phones and tablets that are in the pipeline, directly referring to the iPhone and iPad as the prime competition.

"And so whether it's the quality of the work of the craftsmanship that our teams are working on, or the capabilities of these devices, they have to be absolutely ground-breaking or why would anybody come to buy them? So I think that the extra time that was necessary to build these devices, and build the operating system and all the applications and the system software necessary to do it — and obviously, we're not going to talk about what they are right now, but they're going to be absolutely magical. And so I think that that's the important thing to realize. And I think that although we're a little bit late, the market potential is so huge, and this is the future of computing. This is the second device into the future of computing." Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO, NVIDIA

NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chipset has long been promised for tablets and smartphones, but it's only within the past couple of months that we're seeing the first devices using the chipset arrive on the market. Meanwhile high-profile tablets like Notion Ink's Adam, which is based around Tegra 2, and rumored slates from ASUS, Motorola and HTC are all incoming.

Huang isn't impressed with the current breed of Android tablets, however, telling CNET that the Galaxy Tab is "a tablet that uses a phone operating system on a large display" but that "a tablet is not a large phone." He says early 2011 will see the main deluge of Tegra 2 powered models arrive.