The Wall Street Journal tipped off the commencement of iPad 2 production, a device expected to be slimmer and lighter than its current counterpart, incorporating a camera for videoconferencing with FaceTime, a feature lost on Apple’s initial iPad version.

The market’s pretty active right now, at least concerning product launches: during the Super Bowl Motorola offered some insight to the new Xoom tablet, and Dell’s got plans for the enterprise with the new 10-inch tablet running on Windows 7 OS, primarily targeting businesses . According to the company’s business product marketing chief Kirk Schell,  “business professionals will tell you that… by introducing multiple operating systems there’s a degree of management cost and consistency that makes that difficult,” he added.

“Encrypting data, remotely wiping data, provisioning and managing patches and so on — there’s a common set of ways to do that across Windows. In an enterprise environment, the goal would be to handle all those devices the same way.”

Furthering the tablet market push, Android’s efforts are committed to the Honeycomb 3.0 OS and Hewlett-Packard’s innovative Touchsmart PC running on WebOS. With such a wide array of products that try to satisfy even the most demanding expectations, we are all wondering how innovative the iPad 2 can be, luring prospective customers that may have been considering an alternative to the iPad’s initial offering.

Despite the growing competition, Android is still a rapidly expanding operating system, and is expected to beat out, numbers-wise, in the end. A Gartner report indicates that in terms of sales by smartphone OS, Android grew 888.8% in 2010, moving to the 2^nd position, in comparison  with Apple iOS’s fourth place in the same year. But the benefits for Google do not stop here. Due to outstanding growth on the market, Google’s mobile-ad revenues will certainly increase as well for as up as $1.3 billion in mobile ads only for 2012, on a background of $850 million from mobile ads in 2010.