By: Hillel Fuld

By now, it is no secret that 2011 is expected to be the year of tablets. It is also expected to be the year of Android, the year or mobile advertising, and the year of 4G technology, but those are topics for another time.

CES was filled with companies who want a piece of Apple’s tablet cake and are doing everything in their power to get it. We saw dozens of new tablets, each with its own unique advantages, some with slideout keyboards, some with two HD recording video cameras, some with dual core processors, and lots of other goodies.

Of course by the time most of these new tablets are released, there will already be an iPad 2 with full multitouch gestures and possibly no buttons on it whatsoever, which should provide an even more intuitive user experience than the first iPad.

In any case, I thought I would share some videos of the top contenders for the tablet king title, which now undeniably belongs to the Apple iPad (sorry Galaxy Tab, but we can still be friends.).

The following are five of the most exciting tablets to be released to the market in the coming months:

1: BlackBerry Playbook: RIM’s debut into the tablet market brings with it a 7″ screen, some pretty sweet looking multitasking capabilities, 1080p recording, and a Cortex A9-based, dual-core 1GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM. Take a look.

2: Motorola XOOM: The mobile giant throws its hat into the tablet ring and what a hat it is…  Fully equipped with Android 3.0, a.k.a Honeycomb, a 10.1″ capacitive screen with a resolution of 1280×800, and the ARM-based Tegra 2 chipset. This is one nice lookin tablet device. Here it is in action.

3: Asus Eee Tablets: Everyone else is doing it, so why not Asus? The Asus tablets seem to address the issue of text input without a hardware keyboard, something I solved with my beloved Zaggmate. In any case, check out some of the cool innovation that went into the all new Asus tablets.

4: Vizio Via Tablet: Vizio, a company most well known for their HDTVs is now blurring the lines of our digital eco system with their new tablet… Watch the video, you will see what I mean…

5: Dell Streak 7: Dell is at it again after their Dell Streak 5″ did not take off… The Streak 7″ runs an nVidia Tegra T20 – Dual Core 1 GHz processor, Android 2.2 (Froyo), and a  Gorilla Glass protected screen… Not bad, not bad at all.

Of course, there were many more tablets announced at CES, but I thought these were the most exciting. If you ask me, my next tablet is coin toss between the iPad 2, Playbook, and XOOM.

So, is 2011 the year in which the tablet hits the mainstream or will people still crowd around to see when you use your Galaxy Tab in the mall? Let me know your predictions in the comments below or on Twitter.