President of Google Eric Schmidt has promised "brutal competition" with Apple in 2012 - especially when it comes to tablets.
While Google's Android platform has found huge success in the fight to dethrone Apple when it comes to phones, on tablets it has struggled.
Several high-profile Android-based tablets have disappeared without a trace - and several more are better known for their legal entanglements with Apple than their own sales figures.
Now Schmidt is promising that the search engine will be "marketing a tablet of the highest quality" within 6 months.
In a (translated) interview with Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper, Schmidt reportedly added that he expected "brutal competition between Apple and Google Android" when it comes to phones in the next 12 months.
Whether that means Google will be producing its own tablet on the model of the recent Galaxy Nexus or just releasing a new version of Android for tablets was unclear.
Tech blogs reacted to the news by identifying two main problems Google has to solve when it comes to tablets: helping to develop enough apps for the larger screen, and producing a form factor that really stands out against the iPad, which sold 11m units in the last quarter alone.
There is hope for Android tablet fan, however. The recently released (in the US, not the UK) Amazon Fire seven-inch tablet has reportedly been a hit with consumers. And while the version of Android it runs bares little visible relation to Google's latest OS, it has at least shown that Apple hasn't quite got the monopoly on large screen devices that some have supposed.