All four national US wireless carriers announced last week that they'll sell Samsung 's  Android-based tablet this fall, and Samsung disclosed a series of media partnerships aimed at making its Galaxy Tab a viable competitor to Apple's iPad.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile in separate announcements said they will offer the 7-inch tablet based on the latest release of Google's Android mobile OS, though none offered details on pricing or specific release dates. Verizon said it will launch the tablet in the "coming weeks," AT&T in the "coming months," Sprint by "this fall," and T-Mobile said "for the holiday season." At a press conference in New York, Samsung said it would launch a Media Hub services with partners including MTV, NBC, Paramount and Universal Home Entertainment, designed to be competitive with Apple's recently revamped Apple TV service.

A Chrome OS-based tablet made by HTC will be offered through Google's new best friend Verizon starting on Nov. 26, according to a new report (or rumor, as the case may be).

Citing an unnamed source, AOL's Download Squad blog says that the new tablet will run on an NVidia Tegra 2 chip, and will feature a 1280x720 screen, 2GB of RAM, at least a 32 GB SSD, and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G connectivity. There's a lot missing among that handful of details, however. For one, why will the tablet run on Chrome OS and not the Android platform? And if it's running on a cloud-based OS, do you really need 32 GB of memory?

After months of dangling the details but withholding price and release date, Dell finally confirmed that AT&T will begin selling its Android-based Streak smartphone/tablet in stores on Friday for $299.99 with a two-year contract.

The pricing, with shoots up to $550 without an AT&T commitment, places the Streak squarely in the middle ground between its two schizophrenic identities. With its 5-inch screen, it's about $100 more than comparably equipped smartphones, but is considerably less expensive than Apple's popular iPad, which ranges from $500 to $830 depending on configuration.

Forget about spending $500 for an iPad. India's human resource development minister, Kapil Sibal, has unveiled a $35 tablet that the country hopes will go into production next year.

Compared to Apple's hot-ticket tablet, it may not have equivalent functionality -- or a hard disk, for that matter -- but at that manufacturing price it's practically disposable.  "We have reached a stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity -- all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything," said Sibal at a press conference in New Delhi on Thursday.

The tablet PC competition gained a new entrant Tuesday as Cisco unveiled its forthcoming Android-based device. But instead of taking aim at the market-creating iPad, Cisco wants its tablet, Cius, to find homes in enterprises, acting as a communications device -- and possible desktop replacement.

Since the iPad is the device du jour, though, comparisons are inevitable. At 1.15 pounds, Cius is lighter than Apple's 1.5 pound tablet, but its 7 inch screen may seem a little puny given that the iPad touts 10 inches. Cisco didn't announce pricing, but it says Cius, which sports a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, will cost less than $1,000.

The primary goal of Hewlett-Packard's pending acquisition of smartphone maker Palm is to gain its mobile operating system, which HP plans to built into everything from tablet PCs to printers.

HP CEO Mark Hurd gave the first detailed look at the company's plans for Palm, once the $1.2 billion acquisition is complete, during the conference call with analysts to discuss the company's second-quarter earnings. Hurd said webOS will go well beyond smartphones, and into connected devices such as tablet PCs and Web printers, complete with an app store. The company also plans to grow Palm's smartphone business, but the acquisition is a broader play to gain a mobile OS.

"It isn't precisely a smartphone play, as I've seen some people write," Hurd said. “It is, for us, strategically broader.”