According to Bloomberg terminal headlines:

• It will have a sharper screen and a faster quad core chip.
• Production will be at full volume by February with the gadget going on sale in March.

Jeremy Horwitz at iLounge reported earlier this week that the iPad 3 will be slightly thicker than the iPad 2 – by about 1 milimeter.

Horwitz says he saw the case of the next iPad, and it seems to have come from someone that makes iPad cases.

What’s more, Apple’s ascendance occurred not too long after the iPad’s release in 2010. As the company’s market share rose, all of its rivals — HP, Dell, Lenovo and Acer — started falling. They haven’t stopped since.

The analyst, Chris Whitmore, sent the note after concluding that none of Apple’s rival has yet hit on a viable alternative to the iPad.

“2011 was supposed to be the year of the Android tablet. One year later, Android tablets have failed to meet expectations and for the most part have been unsuccessful,” Whitmore wrote in the note, according to Fortune. “This year, tablets had a much smaller presence as vendors appear to be placing greater emphasis on Windows 8.”

“We remain skeptical that Win 8 tablets will gain much traction this year,” he added.

Whitmore concluded that the move away from Android to Windows 8 will take time, creating a “favorable competitive backdrop for Apple’s forthcoming iPad 3.”

Whitmore, who based his chart on IDC data, isn’t the first one to assess how the PC market would look if iPads were considered part of the mix. In November, market research firm Canalys ran a similar calculation. Canalys, which did not provide data to support its findings, predicted that Apple would overtake HP as the world’s top PC maker “before the second half of 2012? if you lumped in iPads.

So should tablets be counted PCs? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Google may be working on its own tablet, but no one knows whether that device will compete with the iPad or go after the Kindle Fire, as DigiTimes suggested in a report. According to the Taiwanese site, officials in Google’s supply chain believe the company is targeting the Kindle Fire with its own 7-inch $200 tablet running on Android 4.0.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in December that the company planned to release a tablet in the next six months, mimicking Google’s Nexus brand for smartphones. The tablet would be “of the highest quality,” Schmidt said in the interview with an Italian newspaper, fueling more speculation about a Google-branded tablet that began in March last year.

In the tablet market, devices running the Android operating system failed to take off, as iPads outsold other tablets by a ratio of about 10 to 1. Even among the non-iPad tablet sales, Android tablets were behind HP’s discontinued TouchPad, according to NPD figures. And in less than two months since it was launched, Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet managed to become the number two tablet after the iPad because of its low price of $199. So after it bought Motorola for $12.5 billion, Google can finally step in and set a benchmark among partner tablet manufactures, just like it did with Nexus smartphones.

Going after number one or number two?

The tablet market represents a slightly different challenge for Google than the smartphone market, where Android has already won (in sales). Google can either pursue Apple’s model to produce high-end tablets, where the biggest profits are, or it could pursue the media tablet market, where Amazon is taking a loss on the hardware and hopes to profit from sales from its content ecosystem, including movies, music, books and apps.

Since Google refused to clarify Schmidt’s comments for the Italian newspaper regarding the tablet, and DigiTimes has a sketchy track record when it comes to speculation on unreleased and unannounced products, it’s hard to tell which path the company will choose for its first tablet.

One thing is clear though: all Google’s own-brand devices were built as an example to Android manufacturing partners of how the company envisions products carrying the OS. Nexus phones never sold in large numbers and never really posed a threat to other devices made by partner manufactures. Whether Google chooses to chase the iPad or the Kindle Fire, its tablet will be a mere example of how other Android tablets need to look and function in order to tackle the market leader.

This was especially apparent on Thursday, when bankers at Credit Suisse lifted the Finnish company’s rating to “buy” and spiked its target price saying it “fundamentally believes” that Nokia’s focus on Windows will allow it to recover and pick up steam 2012. At the same time, UBS cut the company’s target price, saying it “continues to believe that Nokia faces significant long-term challenges.”

In the case of Nokia, bankers have very little, if any, substantial data to fill their complicated valuation models with.

There is no way to stretch out the tangent line of Nokia’s future earnings in any direction, simply because no one knows if the new Windows phones Nokia makes will fly or die. Not surprisingly, Nokia’s shares are among the most volatile out there. With no way to predict anything about Nokia, its shares have become entirely driven by news and rumors rather than facts and figures. On Thursday, they were up almost 4%, with no convincing, fact-based reason.

Having to put a recommendation on Nokia’s stock at this point in time must be a real nightmare. So rather than assigning the difficult task of predicting Nokia’s future failure or success to BlackBerry-using finance types in London — who probably care more about the enterprise value to sales model than downloading cool apps — it seems one should give the challenge to a class of 16-year-old high-school students. These guys can actually tell you what’s hot and what’s not.

Programmer database startup Interviewstreet is hosting an online coding challenge called CodeSprint beginning Friday, and 75 technology companies will be looking for employment candidates on its leaderboard.

Coders who sign up for the challenge will receive an email on Friday evening when a set of programming problems becomes available. As they solve problems throughout the weekend, they will earn points and can see how they stack up against other participants. After the challenge ends on Sunday night, the participating companies will have the opportunity to contact specific candidates for job interviews based on their performance.

Questions will include basic programming challenges as well as real-world problems. A practice problem in the latter category, for instance, asks users to create a program that finds what time of day any Twitter user tweets most often. Some companies, including Groupon, have created problems that are relevant to their own engineering challenges. In all cases, better code that works faster will earn more points.

This is the second time that Interviewstreet has hosted a coding challenge. The first event, in October, only admitted students at select universities, resulting in 140 job interviews. This upcoming challenge will allow anyone with Internet access to participate.

Interviewstreet is not conducting virtual employment hackathons out of sympathy for unemployed computer scientists (of which there are few). Coding challenges are core to its business, which catalogs programmers based on skills they have proved themselves in. When an employer hires a coder it finds on the site, or through a CodeSprint challenge, they pay the startup $10,000.

Are you participating in the CodeSprint challenge? Let us know in the comments below.

The quad-GPU setup scorched 3DMark Vantage with a P (performance) score of over 83,000 and GPU score of over 98,000, and grabbed 3DMark 11 P and X (extreme) scores of 32,728 and 17,432, respectively. Hats off to Andre, whose Battlefield 3 gaming experience will surely be unrivaled, though we still wouldn’t want to be the ones having to pay his power bill.