There are tremendous amounts of talks about slate-type personal computers becoming the next big thing in mobile computing. However, the president of ARM Holdings, the company whose microprocessor technology powers the lion’s share of mobile phones, claims that the massive success of tablets is not completely guaranteed.

“It is an interesting market. What we have to be very careful of is projecting just how big that particular part of the market is going to be, because it’s very early days since any of these tablets have been on the market,” said Tudor Brown, president of ARM, in an interview with the Financial Times at the Computex trade show in Taiwan.

Slate-type PCs are not meant to create content, but to consume content. As a result, it is crucial for their success that there are services providing various benefits or content. In fact, popularization of various cloud-based services will catalyze popularity of various mobile devices, which will get new features or functionality thanks to remotely located high-performance data centers. But those devices will not necessarily be tablets.

“We’re actually into a period of experimentation at the market level, and I’m expecting to see a range of devices Maybe we will see more tablets, different user interfaces, and different ways people are going to use them. But from where I’m sitting right now I think it’s too early to make wild predictions,” said Mr. Brown.

ARM itself expects processors based on the company’s architecture to power half of slates that will be available in the coming years.

Tags: Cortex