Jeff Orr of ABI Research was one of my go-to analysts when I covered netbooks and tablets in my past life as a tech reporter. So I was pleased to speak to him again last week and get his thoughts on where tablets and other mobile hardware are headed next year. Here are eight of his predictions:

1) Consumer tablets (iPad, Galaxy Tab, etc.) won't kill the rugged device market. Bulky, ugly, but tough as nails, a few million Windows-based tablet PCs are bought every year for military, field service or health care use. Drop them off a moving truck, expose them to a swirling sandstorm, spill fizzing beer on their keyboards - no problem for these ruggedized, miltary-grade devices.

The biggest chink in their armor? Their price. Vendors such as Panasonic and Motion charge between $2,000 to $5,000 for their gear. Even 'business-rugged' devices from Lenovo and Dell tend to start for at least $1,000.

That makes them all vulnerable to $500 tablets like the iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook and others. With their huge and growing selection of apps, and the option to add a military-grade case, won't companies just go the consumer tablet route?

Orr disagrees. "The reality today is that enterprises are evaluating the iPad because they have to, not necessarily because they want to," he said. Rugged devices still have some advantages over consumer ones: swivel-around keyboards, larger screens, more enterprise apps, even a bigger selection of add-ons (vehicle mount, anyone?).

However, Orr does believe that rugged tablet makers will start switching from Windows to Android to remain cost-competitive, some doing that sooner than later.

2) On the other hand, consumer tablets will dominate over enterprise tablets like the Cisco Cius and the Avaya Flare. The latter products will vary greatly in size - 7-inches for the Cius, 12-inches for the Flare. Both will, according to Orr, "serve a purpose not addressed in the enterprise today": a communications device optimized for quick videoconferences or tele-meetings with co-workers.

At the same time, "that's not the market opportunity," said Orr, adding that "it's a bit of a distraction to call them a tablet, since they aren't intended to be a companion device."

3) Microsoft won't port Windows Phone 7 to tablets. Orr calls the new smartphone OS "really crisp." But he doesn't expect Redmond to bring it to tablets the way Google is doing with Android, pointing to its very name as a strong signal of Microsoft's segmentation strategy.

Not that he is so high on Microsoft's current tablet strategy. "It's still a bit elusive," he said. "They've been making tablet PCs for a decade now, but the UI (user interface) still needs help." On when tablets will eclipse netbooks, Orr says he "doesn't see a cross-over point."

4) ARM will continue to reign in the near-term. Consumer tablets based around Intel's Atom CPU may start arriving next year, but Orr thinks an actual invasion of Atom tablets "will be slow in coming...there will still be many ARM vendors versus a few Atom-based ones. I'm not too bullish [about Atom] next year."

5) Dual-core CPUs won't dominate in 2011. The ARM Cortex A8 is the dominant mobile CPU today, used in the iPhone 3GS/4, the iPad, the Motorola Droid/Droid 2/Droid X, and others.

That won't change next year, says Orr, despite RIM's apparent promise to release a dual-core PlayBook for under $500 early next year. Orr does expect some manufacturers, especially business-focused ones, to join RIM and release tablets running the multi-core Cortex A9, just to push the market forward, though.

6) On operating systems: Google Chrome could be a "really interesting play" on tablets because of its instant-browse capability. RIM's QNX operating system for its coming PlayBook, meanwhile, won't "be that much of a departure from what RIM already has."

7) With a tough economy, $500 tablets will become a popular 'family gift' this Christmas. While tablets are still a luxury, "I get the impression that people are looking for a bit of good cheer this year," he said. To compromise with the uncertain economy, families will buy tablets as collective gifts.

Orr expects 11 to 13 million tablets to be sold this year, putting him at the bottom of analyst estimates. He remains relatively cautious next year, too, forecasting 22 million tablet shipments.

8) Netbooks will still outsell tablets for the foreseeable future. Rampant tablet bulls like Digitimes Research are predicting that tablets could outsell netbooks as early as this Christmas quarter. Not Orr, who is forecasting 43 million netbooks to be sold this year, or 4x his tablet forecast.

Netbooks "continue to grow at a very respectable rate. It's not the same as the last two years, but there's no decline," he said. By 2015, when Orr expects 80 million tablets to be sold, netbooks will still be ahead. "I don't see a cross-over point," he said.

When I think of Gartner, I think of high-priced consiglieres for CIOs or authors of sober-but-influential reports (though their recent mobile device forecasts have, say some, put them in the oh-so-breathless camp).

I don't look to them for snarky rants - that's what bloggers (like me) are for.

Gartner VP and collaboration analyst Craig Roth, however, hit a nerve, with his blog post today, 'Not Sent From My iPhone.'

E-mail signatures like the iPhone's default 'Sent from my iPhone' were a small apology-by-way-of-explanation why the sender's e-mail reply to your 30-page memo/PowerPoint would sound rushed, miss key points, and be filled with typos.

It also implied that the sender would send a much better reply upon his/her return to the office.

But with reading e-mail on our smartphone or tablet becoming the New Normal, not the exception, Roth suggests what you actually need is an e-mail signature for the increasingly-special cases when you are actually desk-bound, reading Microsoft Outlook.

I enjoyed everything from its thin-skinned opening - "I just happened to be using my desktop today and I see nothing wrong with that" - to its fake apologies - "if I didn't get every nuance of your carefully-crafted, multi-point missive, then it's your own darn fault...if my response is terse and doesn't fully address all your issues, it's because I don't want to."

Roth points out a real truth: while sitting in front of our "15 lb., 2 foot tall, 6 year old steel brick of a PC" and large, multiple screens should give us the ability to craft more well-thought-out e-mails, we aren't necessarily going to want to.

In today's Attention Economy, time and brain cells, not money, is the scarce currency of the Information Worker. When your smartphone is already conditioning you to treat e-mails the same as text messages, is there any way to fight that?

This is neither positive nor negative, it's just part of the same unstoppable trend why I gave up in-depth, 1,000 word+ articles for 300-word blog posts (well, mostly)

(Updated with Google's Nov. 17 announcement) It's soooo easy to get caught up on the latest iPad app that turns Twitter into a video game or rumors of an iPad 2 commercial being shot by a latter-day Austin Powers, and forget that most potential iPad buyers have much more basic concerns.

Like one reader, who wrote in: "I work in school administration and also work for a not for profit...I have a question and cannot seem to get a straight answer: can you use Microsoft Word and Excel on the iPad? Is there some kind of app that would allow you to access a Word doc and edit it and send it back to yourself? This is the one area that I cannot seem to really get a handle on, which in turn keeps me from laying out my 600 bucks."

Excellent question! I did a little digging around and compiled a comprehensive list of all the various options for viewing/editing Microsoft Office documents on an iPad:

1) Microsoft Office Web Apps - free, but view-only on iPad

It's not true that Microsoft doesn't offer Office for iPad users. It just doesn't have a mobile Office app. What it DOES offer is a cloud version called Office Web Apps.

Office Web Apps is Microsoft's grudging reply to Google Docs. So it's a lightweight version of Office that, like Google Docs, lets users easily collaborate on docs.

Office Web Apps lacks many of Office's bells and whistles. Most users won't find that too much of a problem, especially since Office Web Apps is free (when using Microsoft's Skydrive service to host the documents).

There are major downsides to Office Web Apps, however, as far as mobile users are concerned:

a) The only mobile devices it runs on are iPads, iPhones (and iTouches) and Windows Phone 7 devices;

b) For iOS-based devices like the iPad, Office Web Apps today offers view-only access, and only to Word and PowerPoint (though there are some rumors that this could change now that iOS 4.2 is available);

c) Despite its name, Office Web Apps is a hosted service, not a mobile app. Meaning its usability depends heavily on the quality of your network connection.

Here's a chart that ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley put up that nicely summarizes the situation today.

Side note #1: Don't be fooled by headlines like this around Microsoft's recently-announced Office 365. Office 365 offers Office Web Apps plus access to hosted versions of Outlook e-mail, Sharepoint  collaboration, and Lync instant messaging (formerly Office  Communicator), as well as the ability to download the full version of Office 2010 Professional Plus. That's nice for PC users, but pointless to iPad users, since Office can't be installed on iOS.

Side note #2: Microsoft also has something called Office 2010 Mobile. This is a full editing/viewing version of Office 2010, but it only works on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.

Side note #3: Despite all of this, there is a way to run a full, edit-capable version of Office on your iPad. It's called application virtualization, and it requires a thin-client app such as Citrix Receiver for iPad and a server-hosted version of Office running in your enterprise data center. Alas, this is neither cheap nor easy for most IT shops to set up, which is why it remains uncommon.

2) Apple iWork for iPad - elegant, but could still frustrate the power user

Apple's counterparts to Word, Excel and PowerPoint are called Pages, Numbers and Keynote. They cost $9.99 each from Apple's App Store. Each can import and edit the relevant Microsoft Office documents.

While they don't natively save in the Office format, they can, as of September, all export documents into the Office format.

So that handily spanks Office Web Apps so far. But here's the catch: while iWork can import a variety of Office formats, it cannot export to the latest Office Open XML format used by Office 2007 and 2010. These are files ending in 'x', such as .docx, .xlsx and .pptx. That could mean an extra file save and the loss of some formatting in the process.

iWork's export to Office is mostly smooth, albeit limited to pre-Office 2007 formats.

And how smooth is the export? Skimming the reviews for the latest version of Pages in iTunes' App Store, I saw more than a dozen complaints about Pages (in)ability to export to PDF. There were only a few complaints about the Word export. Some users complained about font problems during Keynote import/export. The most serious complaints seemed to involve import-export between Numbers-Excel.

"Created a spreadsheet using Apple's Invoice template (& yes, the app gets points for looking beautiful)," went one November review. "But after exporting to Excel on my Mac, it distributed my invoice data across several different spreadsheets in Excel!!! What was once an impressive looking spreadsheet on my iPad became an unusable mess in Excel. And importing an Excel spreadsheet into the app didn't go much better."

"Was hoping to work with my excel docs in this app... No dice. Always returns errors and usually wont even open my documents...Waste of 10 bucks," went another review in the App Store. Still another reviewer claimed to encounter "15 different errors" after importing an Excel spreadsheet.

Plenty of users still like iWork, though. App Store reviewers gave iWork an overall 4 out of 5 stars, tops among the iPad productivity apps listed here.

Bottom line: Power users may be frustrated by iWork's handling of Office documents, but it may be serviceable for most everyone else.

3) Google Docs – ‘primitive’ spreadsheet and document editing

On November 17, Google announced that iPhone, iPad as  well as Android 2.2 Froyo users will now be able to edit existing text  documents, in addition to the existing ability to edit spreadsheets.  Android users get a cool new feature – the ability to edit documents  using voice commands.

Otherwise, the editing capability is, in the words of a PC World reviewer,  “appears to be primitive compared to proper office apps, with only the   ability to write text in the document’s current font, edit spread  sheets  and add bullet points…The list of missing features is still  pretty long. You can’t create new  documents, change fonts or styles,  add hyperlinks, format text, add  images, or do any other advanced  editing that Google Docs already allows  on the desktop.” So ratchet your expectations accordingly.

4) Documents To Go - does it live up to its impressive pedigree on the iPad?

This app is created by DataViz, who have proven themselves over the last decade with their Office viewers/editors for the BlackBerry and other smartphones.

For the iPad, Documents To Go comes in two versions:

- a $9.99 version that offers viewing/editing of Word and Excel documents, including Office Open XML files,

- a $16.99 Premium version that adds PowerPoint viewing/editing.

It also can access files hosted at the widest variety of cloud sources: Google Docs, Box.net, DropBox, Apple's iDisk and SugarSync. http://www.tipb.com/2010/06/06/documents-to-go-ipad-app-review/

TiPb liked the syncing features of Documents To Go, and rated it "absolutely fantastic" for the average user, though somewhat lacking for enterprise users.

ZDNet's Matthew Miller called Documents To Go "very powerful" and his personal favorite, though he noted that the app, originally written for the smaller iPhone, had not at that time been rewritten to take advantage of the iPad's 10-inch screen.

Version 4.0, released since that review, fixes some of that. However, the current version only garners 3 out of 5 stars from App Store reviewers.

Complaints include limited font support, tendency to crash, synchronization problems, poor technical support, and more (see DataViz's Documents To Go iOS forum to read more).

5) QuickOffice Connect - flexible, slick but may be missing some advanced features.

A relative newcomer (it was released in June), the $19.99 QuickOffice offers viewing/editing of Word and Excel files, and viewing of PowerPoint documents, including Office 2007/2010 docs.

Like Documents To Go, it also gives users a choice of online hosting platforms (Box.net, Google Docs, DropBox, MobileMe). http://www.tipb.com/2010/06/25/quickoffice-hd-ipad-app-review/

TiPb's reviewer praised QuickOffice's user interface and navigation features, but decried its lack of advanced features.

Laptop magazine's reviewer gave QuickOffice 4 out of 5 stars, praising its "attractive interface and ability to sync with files stored all over the cloud," but agreed that the lack of PowerPoint editing could be a problem.

App Store reviewers give it 3 out of 5 stars for the current version.

6) Office2 HD - bargain of the bunch, but how much do you give up?

At $7.99, Office2 HD is the least expensive of the choices for editing Office documents. Like QuickOffice and Documents To Go's standard version, Office2 HD lets you view and create Word (DOC and DOCX) and Excel (XLS) documents, but only view PowerPoint files.

And like the two above, it can access documents at a number of locations (Google Docs, DropBox and MobileMe). http://gigaom.com/mobile/ipad-google-docs-editing/

GigaOm called Office2 HD "surprisingly full-featured if you approach it with a  Google Docs mentality — it’s good enough for most users, but won’t  replace every function found in the Microsoft Office suite. Aside from  charts and other advanced features offered by Google Docs, the basics  are all here."

Office2 HD: a bargain for the no-frills-seeking user.

MacWorld, meanwhile, opined "while iWork may offer nicer-looking and more capable editing and  formatting options, the fact that you can use Office2 to easily access  your work documents make it a practical and powerful tool for getting  real work done." http://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=1449&review=Apple+iPad+Apps+Byte2+Office2+HD+for+iPad+Review

TabletPCReview gave Office2 HD 3 out of 5 stars, faulting it for crashing a few times without any error messages, along with other more minor issues, but still calling it a "fairly decent deal".

App Store reviewers give Office2 HD 3.5 out of 5 stars for the current version.