The world's largest chipmaker (which, let's not forget, supplies millions of laptop and desktop processors to Apple every year) will, of course, not be a bystander in tablet competition. And one of its strongest contenders for this market is a future Atom chip codenamed "Moorestown."
 

In a recent interview at the Consumer Electronics Show, Pankaj Kedia, director of Intel's Global Ecosystems Program for Mobile Internet Devices and Smart Phones, said that the Moorestown "system-on-a-chip" processor will ship in the first half of this year. And during a CES keynote, Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini brandished a tablet using Moorestown from a company called OpenPeak.

On Thursday, I posed some questions to Dan Gittleman, chief executive of OpenPeak, and Brian Woods, the company's chief marketing officer.

OpenPeak designs and develops products for companies like Verizon and Telefonica--two of its current customers. I asked Gittleman to describe how the tablet demonstrated at CES would be used. "We don't expect it to be a full PC replacement but rather a much more convenient platform for accessing a lot of services that you currently get on a PC: news, Facebook, weather, streaming music, casual games, etc.," he said in response to an e-mail query.

The tablet could also be "the ultimate control panel. A great security panel, baby/house monitor, home energy monitor," Gittleman said. Woods added that announcements of devices will happen "over the course of the next several months" and in the second half of the year.