A brief look at all the tablets on the market or soon to hit the stores.

Toshiba will spend about US$1.19 billion to build a new fabrication plant to produce the panels for Apple.

The US Army wants to issue every soldier an iPhone or Android cellphone -it could be a soldier's choice. And to top it off, the Army wants to pay your monthly phone bill.

Micron says some flash controller jobs are going to migrate down stack towards the NAND chips, freeing up controller manufacturers from chip-dependent work they shouldn't be doing. It sees low-level flash controllers developing and taking on error management, taking this job away from existing NAND controllers.

None of the companies involved in the bidding have publicly disclosed their participation. But those patents are likely what Apple is most interested in, since it's rumored that a "Verizon iPhone" will come with LTE support.

We may doubt the prospects of the bada platform, but Samsung is one stubborn company and that could be a good thing after all. As a matter of fact, they said the plan to sell 5 million bada-powered devices this year is going just fine.

In the smartphone business, the conventional wisdom is that everyone is battling for third place behind Google and Apple.

IDC forecasts that worldwide semiconductor revenues will grow 9% on year in 2011, and will achieve a CAGR of 6% for the 2010-2015 forecast period. "Near term, the semiconductor market should hit bottom by the second quarter of next year and begin a growth cycle that will take us into the second half of 2012..."

China's exports for November 2010 were up 34.9% versus a year earlier, compared with an expected 25%. In October the increase was only 22.9%.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) plans to build one more "mega-fab" at a cost of up to NT$300 billion (US$10 billion). Construction of the fab, codenamed Fab 16, will start in 2014 probably at the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP).

China's crackdown on ethnic reporters and Iran's sustained suppression of critics has helped push the number of journalists jailed worldwide to 145 - the highest level in 14 years, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.

ASML now expects fourth-quarter bookings to be above two billion euro. "NAND flash memory investments for the high volume ramp of new technologies and foundry/logic commitments for new strategic fab projects are driving brisk lithography demand for 2011..."

Computer hackers have sent one of the world's biggest credit card companies into meltdown in revenge for cutting off payments to the WikiLeaks website. The attack was launched by a shadowy international group called ?？nonymous' which

China is awarding a peace prize to counter the Nobel recognizing imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo. Organizers of the Confucius Peace Prize will honor former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan in Beijing for his efforts at building peace between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.

Everybody knows BlackBerry OS 6 is a stopgap. It's a way to keep the business going (and keep enterprise customers attached to their BlackBerry Enterprise Servers) while RIM works on the world-beating next big thing, which seems to involve a QNX core, TAT interface, Torch Mobile Web browser, and dual-core processors.

Toshiba's shipments of NAND flash memory chips may fall as much as 20% in January and February because of a power outage at a plant, the company said.

The chips will be used in "premier" smartphone brands, Otellini said today at an investor conference in San Francisco. He declined to name any customers.

The billionaire founder of social network Facebook has agreed to give the majority of his wealth to charity, part of a broader group of rich entrepreneurs committing to philanthropy earlier in their lives. Mark Zuckerberg has signed onto the "Giving Pledge," which asks its signatories to commit publicly to give away the majority of their wealth.