A new survey on consumer attitudes toward mobile devices from Forrester Research reports that 14% of U.S. consumers plan to buy slate computing devices this year, according to MediaBistro, even though many seem confused about exactly what a slate computer is. The report, by Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, attributes this level of interest among early adopter consumers to Apple’s brilliant marketing of the iPad, although it notes that not all of these potential buyers are Apple users, implying that competitive devices, if marketed well, will attract part of this market. The report says that they are “voracious media consumers” and own multiple PCs and connected devices.

This is the second report from Forrester and Ms. Epps predicting continued strong growth of the tablet marketplace. In June Forrester published a report predicting that tablets would outsell netbooks by 2012 . That actually may have been conservative.

Forrester isn’t the only computer industry watcher to see strong growth in mobile computing. Gartner published a report this month saying that worldwide mobile device sales grew 13.8%. This growth, of course, includes smartphones as well as iPads, but the message is the same – mobile is a growth star in a largely stalled economy.

For SMBs the message here is that portable computing is growing, and if they want to reach their markets, particularly if they are selling to an affluent consumer market or to senior executives in B2B markets, they should get on this bandwagon. One strategy for that is to develop an app to give away to those users through the Apple App Store and through similar outlets for users of tablets running Android, Windows, and other operating environments as they appear.

It also means that retailers and other SMBs in consumer markets should also look into location-based services such as Facebook Places, FourSquare, and Yelp. These take advantage of one of the latest additions to the growing list of mobile device services, a GPS locator, to track the location of individual smartphones and iPads and provide information, basically ads, for services near that location. So consumers looking for a restaurant, store, or other service can simply pull out their mobile device to see what is nearby.

Another area that SMBs should look at is products and services they can supply directly to tablet computers. In the publishing industry, for instance, e-books are now the established growth segment of the book publishing marketplace, while physical books sales, both in stores and over the Internet, are slowly shrinking.

And this is not just about consumer markets. B2B suppliers are likely to find their customers using mobile devices, including iPads and other tablets, for communications including shopping for and ordering business services and supplies. Making that easier can provide an important competitive advantage.

This also makes net neutrality a vital issue for SMBs. In an increasingly mobile marketplace, the Internet is the highway over which you will reach your customers, whether they are consumers walking down the street or business executives ordering supplies. If you are regulated to a digital back street while large competitors get exclusive use of the fast lanes, you will be competing at a disadvantage regardless of your market.