HP had some big news yesterday, reigning tablets supreme at their webOS event. The big announcements were of three new webOS tablets: the Palm Pre 3, Veer, and Touchpad Tablet, introduced shortly before the unveiling of the iPad 2.  The Touchpad gets a closer look here, outlining some of its features including its advanced keyboard, easy integration options and many other features, including Flash support.

Electronics giant Dell unveiled the biggest update yet to its business computers portfolio this week, introducing 24 new products. These included 7 new Latitude laptops, a new convertible Latitude tablet called the XT3, 3 Precision workstations and more, including one yet to be named upcoming 10-inch Windows 7 enterprise-centric tablet.

“Referring to the revamped Latitude mobile PC range — into which the as-yet-unnamed Windows 7 tablet will fall — Schell said that “just about every inch of the product has been redesigned” to “feel more premium.”

The tablet is expected to launch in the first half of 2011.

Tablets are widely expected to replace workplace / employee PCs in many regards since they are, among other great things, mobile, which would at least theoretically enable a given workforce to become more efficient. Dell is looking to the tablet market and surging enterprise demand as a means of restoring its market position, and is headed towards different paths with its enterprise and consumer devices.

Moving to the other side of the tablet war, Inc.com covered an IT workplace case study, as well as the analysts’ take on the upcoming iPad 2. The iPad is a popular tool for Telltale Games’ 80 or so employees, and Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle predicts the iPad 2 will feature multi-tasking, a multi-core CPU and Near-Field Communications.  This will make the second-gen iPad much more competitive with the current market, putting Apple that much further ahead of the curve.  If an early release were to take place, Apple would be forcing the hand of other manufacturers, now playing catch up with the iPad.

IBM is no stranger to employee tablet use, and recently added support for the BlackBerry and, of course, the iPad, in its internal network. We gave the SiliconANGLE on this update in context to enterprise use of social media, as well as the cloud. That includes insurance companies, the healthcare industry, Yahoo! (who recently dropped its own Hadoop distribution in favor of Apache Hadoop) and others.