Consumers who may have otherwise snatched up the iPad during the quarter instead opted for the iPhone 4S, causing shipments to fall short of the company’s estimates. “The rollout of the iPhone 4S in October generated intense competition for Apple purchasers’ disposable income, doing more to limit iPad shipment growth than competition from the Kindle Fire and other media tablets”, tablet analyst Rhoda Alexander says.

While Amazon does not break out Kindle sales, IHS believes the device sold about 3.9 million units in its first quarter of availability. This pales in comparison to the 15.4 million iPads shipped in the same quarter, but the iPad ecosystem is much more mature. Instead compare it to the iPad’s initial quarter back in April through June of 2010. Apple sold 3.2 million units in its first quarter. Impressed now?

I would not call the Kindle Fire an iPad killer. At the same time, I think fellow Android tablet manufacturers now have some very strong competition: Amazon’s desire to link its entertainment services with a device at low cost is proving attractive to consumers.

The Kindle Fire isn’t for everybody. It’s basically a glorified e-book reader, with some tablet like characteristics. Either way, consumers are responding to it, and Amazon clearly has a success on its hands.

As for the next-generation iPad itself, sources say it will be pretty much what we’ve been led to expect by the innumerable reports leading up to its release: A device similar in form factor to the iPad 2, but running a much faster chip, sporting an improved graphics processing unit, and featuring a 2048×1536 Retina Display — or something close to it.

The only input device that the iPad was designed to be used with is the human finger, and designing a decent iPad-compatible stylus is tricky–most of them have blunt, squishy tips that don’t feel like a pen point. But with a brush, being blunt and squishy actually works–and the nicely-made Nomad Brush feels like a real art instrument.

It doesn’t feel exactly like one: For one thing, real brushes, dipped in paint, have a fluid feel that you don’t get when you’re dragging a dry brush over a tablet. And while a real brush is the most gloriously pressure-sensitive input device of them all, this one, like standard styluses, isn’t pressure-sensitive. But in art programs like ArtRage, SketchBook Pro, and Brushes, using Nomad Brush feels much more painterly than working with a garden-variety stylus.

I tried the $39 Nomad Compose, a model with a long brush on one end and a stubbier one on the other. The company makes other models, including the Nomad Play, a stubby version designed for kids. If you paint. draw, or doodle on an iPad, check them out.

Razer is proudly not participating in that version of the future with Project Fiona, a concept Windows-based tablet that plays high-end PC games. The tablet has controller handles on either side of the 10.1-inch display, each with their own thumbsticks, buttons and triggers. Inside, there’s enough processing power to run games like Warhammer 40000: Space Marine and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on high settings.

When Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan was telling me all this a couple weeks before the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, I didn’t entirely believe the company could pull it off. But then I played with Project Fiona myself at Razer’s booth. I don’t know how the company did it–and I dare not fathom at what cost–but the concept actually works.

Well, here are a couple guesses: The tablet is roughly an inch thick, so there’s plenty of room to pack meaty specs inside, along with a fan to keep the system cool. Also, whenever I asked about battery life, I couldn’t get a straight answer. Razer is targeting a not-unreasonable sub-$1,000 price for the final product, so somewhere, there’s got to be a compromise to make this kind of tablet happen.

In fact, that’s what Razer will be figuring out before it brings an actual product to market toward the end of the year. As Razer’s Alex Shows told me at CES, there’s a balance to be struck between thinness and performance, and it’s also not clear yet whether Fiona’s winged controllers will be detachable. Razer plans to give concept tablets to developers and other partners to figure out what works best.

For now, though, I like the concept. Developers will be able to add touch screen enhancements for their games, but they won’t be required, and most games should work out of the box. Razer is also working on a partnership with the streaming game service OnLive, which raises the very cool possibility of starting to play a game on a home PC or TV, then resuming progress immediately on the tablet. The finished product will ship with Windows 8, so the touch screen will have a proper tablet operating system to run with.

The other thing to consider is that Razer primarily is in the PC gaming peripheral business, so I’m sure it’s dawned on the company to sell tablet controller attachments in addition to full-fledged gaming devices. For that to make sense, however, tablets need to be powerful enough to run high-end PC games in the first place. I’m glad someone is trying to make it happen.

Here are some more photos of Razer’s Project Fiona:

When I attended IFA in Berlin in September and CEATEC in Tokyo in October, one of my favorite products at both shows was the same item: Toshiba’s 10″ tablet. But back then, Toshiba wasn’t saying anything about plans to bring it to the U.S.

Now it is. In this country, the tablet will be known as the Excite X10, and Toshiba says it will show up in “mid-Q1 2012″. (I guess that most likely means February.) It’s one of the company’s major announcements at CES, which is beginning to get underway in Las Vegas even though the show floor doesn’t open until Tuesday.

Toshiba says that the X10 is the thinnest 10″ tablet in the world–and it’s the only Android tablet I’ve seen that’s on a par with the iPad 2 in terms of pure industrial-design panache. In person, it looks nicer and is less of an iPad wannabe than it looks like in the above picture–the magnesium-alloy case has curvier corners than the iPad, and an indentation that runs around the edge. It weighs 1.18 pounds and is .3″ thick.

In terms of specs, the Excite has the goodies you might expect in a high-end Android tablet, including a 16:10 10.1″ display 1280-by-800 resolution and Corning Gorilla Glass, a 1.2-GHz TI OMAP dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a MicroSD slot, Micro-HDMI and Micro-USB ports, a 2-megapixel camera on the front and a 5-megapixel one on the rear, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Judged on pure hardware appeal, the Excite looks like a winner; as usual, with Android tablets, though, the software side is a stickier matter. Toshiba’s press release says the Excite has “the latest Android technology,” but when I got a sneak peek at the tablet recently, Toshiba representatives told me that they weren’t yet positive whether it would ship with Honeycomb 3.2 or Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0. If it goes out the door with Honeycomb, they said, it will get Ice Cream Sandwich as soon as possible.

Toshiba will release two models of the Excite: a 16GB one for $529 and a 32GB one for $599. The first version is $30 more than an 16GB iPad 2, and the second one is the same price as a 32GB iPad 2. That’s steep, especially given that the prices of other Android tablets have started to tumble. (Last week, Sony knocked its Tablet S down to $400.)

Toshiba does have a 10.1″ tablet in the Sony’s price range, though: Its 10.1″ Thrive, which loses the Excite’s sex appeal but gains a removable battery and full size ports, remains on the market at $380. So does the 7″ Thrive which I recently reviewed. Toshiba plans to approach the tablet business much like it does the laptop business, with multiple product lines with different priorities and price points.

If I knew I wanted an Android tablet, the Excite X10 would certainly be on my list of contenders; if price wasn’t a big issue, it might even be at the top of it. (I’d want to see reviews with battery-test results before I plunked down my money, however.)

But Toshiba, like all makers of Android tablets, is still hobbled by the fact that Google’s software isn’t yet an inspiring tablet operating system, and it’s way too short on top-notch tablet apps. That’s why the question “Why should I buy this instead of an iPad?” is still so difficult for Android tablets to answer convincingly. Even an attractive one like the Excite X10.

I checked out one of these controllers, Gametel, from a Sweden-based company called Fructel. The controller clamps on to an Android phone or iPhone–or pairs remotely to an iPad–and communicates via Bluetooth. It includes a directional pad, four face buttons and two shoulder buttons on top. Gametel’s built-in battery runs for about nine hours before needing a charge from either mini USB or Apple’s 30-pin connector, depending on model.

I didn’t get a chance to try the other controller, from ION, makers of the iCade arcade cabinet for the iPad (Engadget went hands-on with it, though). ION’s latest controller, the iCade Mobile, has the same button layout as Gametel, and uses Bluetooth to communicate, but it also has a unique dock that supports both landscape and portrait orientation.

As for supported games, Gametel’s website has a list of them, and they’ll be the same for any Bluetooth game controller, because they’re all using the same method to communicate with the smartphone or tablet. (They’re all just mimicking keyboard input.) Because of this, I expect more game developers will start supporting physical buttons, creating a platform within a platform for button-based games.

Unfortunately, these controllers are pricey. The iCade Mobile will cost $80 when it launches in Q2, and the Gametel currently costs 50 pounds in the United Kingdom. Fructel hasn’t set U.S. pricing, but hopes to launch the Gametel stateside this quarter.