It’s going to be a big week for tablets.  On Wednesday, March 2, Apple will hold its iPad 2 event, at which the company will show us what it’s got in store for the next model of the iPad.  There’s lots of speculation.  The image above, from the Web site BGR, is circulating around the tech blogs: it was hoped to be an illustration of the actual iPad 2, but seems, instead, to be an Apple’s fan’s imagining, according to TUAW (I frankly doubt Apple would design anything this square).  There’s murmurs, too, that Apple will release this next iPad in both black and white models (see this post from MacRumors); ooooh.

Whatever Apple brings to the next iPad (a camera, better display, can opener), for the first time, the world’s most popular tablet has some actual competition: David Pogue of the NYT favorably reviewed Motorola’s entry into the tablet game, the Xoom, and he says that its operating system, a tablet-specific version of Google Android called Honeycomb, is “the real iPad competitor,” though he also notes its in some ways too complicated and counter-intuitive.  But this is the OS that will power the throngs of tablets soon to hit the market.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Apple has anticipated Honeycomb’s advances and shortcomings.  But whatever happens, this is going to be the year that the tablet becomes a product category, not just another name for the iPad.  And that should mean more e-books, and e-books becoming more a part of readers’ way of life. And it’s likely to really get underway this week.  Whoa…