Pocket Gamer’s headline writer seems to have made a massive typo. I’m pretty sure that Top 10 tablets that could topple the iPad 2 should have read Top 10 tablets that won’t topple the iPad 2, although one of them will replace it and another might cause it a bit of grief. Tsk! You just can’t get the sub-editors these days, can you?

Entering serious mode for a moment (sorry), I wonder why publications continue to churn out the same old list, including tablets that haven’t made the slightest dent in the market. As has been remarked by various writers, there really isn’t a tablet market right now—there’s an iPad one. Hardly anyone cares about the PlayBook and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and even fewer people are excited by whatever Asus, Motorola, Toshiba and Lenovo are firing on to store shelves, cunningly forgetting to back up their efforts with the kind of ecosystem that made the iPad the success that it is.

Here are my predictions for 2012, regarding the tablet market:

• The iPad 2 will continue to sell like hot cakes.
• The iPad 3, assuming it’s released, will also sell like hot cakes.
• Idiot tech hacks will leap on any slide in the iPad’s marketshare as proof the iPad is finally ‘doomed’ and that Android tablets are ‘gaining ground fast’. Said Android tablets will remain, relatively speaking, a niche concern, with one important exception…
• The Amazon Kindle Fire will sell like hot cakes, appealing to people who can’t afford an iPad and/or only want a device primarily intended for media consumption. Hacks will use the Fire’s sales as further proof of Android’s impending dominance, ignoring the fact Amazon’s tablet is far from a standard Android device and that Amazon itself barely mentions Android at all.
• Assuming Windows 8 ships on time, it’ll grab some of the market, but it won’t be nearly as dominant as Windows on the desktop, in part because Microsoft’s late to the party (see also: Windows Phone), but also because Windows 8 for tablets is looking like it will be a ham-fisted amalgamation of radically different interaction models, rather than an entirely user-friendly touchscreen experience.

I think that’s it. Next year won’t be all about the iPad, but it will be all about the iPad and the Kindle. I’ll be very happy to be wrong about this—Apple and Amazon could both do with extra competition, in order to push them even more towards making the best devices possible. But where’s it going to come from? Which other companies have shown even the slightest understanding of what people really want? Which of them cater for what people want to do rather than just checking off bullet-points on a list? And which have the ecosystem to support their tablets?