As the tablet market explodes, the use of NAND flash memory will follow suit in 2011. NAND is used in tablets for the storage of content, such as books, photos, music, and movies.

Tablet consumption of NAND flash is expected to soar from 476.8 million gigabytes in 2010 to 2.3 billion gigabytes in 2011, an increase of 382.4 percent. Shipments of NAND for tablets show no sign of slowing down in the years to come, eventually hitting 12.3 billion GB by 2014, according to IHS iSuppli.

Average memory densities will range from 27.1GB for non-iPad slates to 41.5GB in the iPad. Windows tablet devices typically come with 32GB to 64GB of solid state storage; this density range is the highest that can be offered by manufacturers while still maintaining costs. Because more memory cannot be provided for Windows tablets without driving the cost out of the sweet spot for pricing, however, the value proposition they provide is not as compelling as their Apple or Android counterparts.

"The bump in NAND consumption among tablets is likely to come from devices such as Apple's iPad as well as a raft of tablet devices powered by the rival Android operating system, expected to hit the market this year," Dee Nguyen, analyst for memory and storage at IHS, said in as statement. "Together, the iPad and Android-based tablets form one strand of the tablet experience offered by manufacturers - one centering on Internet-based media consumption. For such tablets, internal storage capacity is less an issue because the devices are intended to provide entertainment, not a full PC computing experience."