If you believed the likes of Apple, Samsung, HTC and BlackBerry, it’s hard to believe we survived as a race before the advent of the tablet PC. But is anyone in their right mind really buying that?

For once, ‘new’ doesn’t really mean better when it comes to gadgets. They did have a certain ‘wow’ factor, but that is fading fast – look around your train carriage or cafe and you’re bound to see one. The reason? The tablet is simply a new form factor that currently brings nothing new to the party, even in its second iteration. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the competition.

You only have to look at laptops such as the latest Acer Aspire to see the difference: four times the RAM, twenty times the storage, bigger screen; and instead of Angry Birds, it has ‘real’ games. Plus it has a physical keyboard you can actually type on and a proper operating system!

In the other corner we have the good old smartphone. Cool Gizmo Toys recently looked at the iPhone 4 and the Wildfire which pack five-megapixel cameras, 512MB of RAM and the capacity for up to 32GB of memory. Plus, they can be used to talk to people, via voice and text and social media, and slip easily into your pocket. 

In the middle, the tablet – not quite one, not quite the other, occupying a made-up marketing space in between. That said there are a few interesting things going on with tablets, and the future looks bright for them. However, for now, it’s hard to imagine the majority of us adopting that oft talked of ‘fourth screen’ (behind the two above and our beloved TV) for anything other than curiosity. But what does the future hold?

Looking into our crystal ball short term, we can see many first and second generation tablet PCs lost down the side of the couch: it’s going to be the third and fourth generation ones that are going to rock. With better internet TV, faster broadband, cheaper memory, a workable replacement for the QWERTY (come on guys, it’s been 150 years!) the tablet will likely replace both the laptop and the PC. We’ll have a massive TV (or one per room), a smartphone for every occasion (and as a remote) and the tablet as mister in-between.

For now though, just give me a 40-inch HD TV, 16-inch quad-core laptop and a four-inch dual-core Android smartphone and I’ll be happy. At least until the end of the year anyway.

This guest post was contributed by Chris Marling, from Broadband Genie, the independent mobile broadband comparison website for the latest in netbooks, tablets and smartphones.