My love affair with the tablet isn't over: I love how it lets me browse the web, read books and magazines, and watch videos in bed after a long day. That's probably how most people use their tablets — secondary devices, mainly for entertainment. After a working day, I don't want to use a PC, and the tablet lets me use the web and other media comfortably, but I wouldn't try to actually use it for work beyond initially planning projects.
It's much more human, for lack of a better word — more intimate, more ergonomic — than a PC for (browsing the web|reading ebooks or PDFs|watching videos|making video calls).
This is exactly how I use my tablet too. I use my computer all day writing code, so when its time to relax with some Netflix, or an ebook I grab my tablet instead. Its perfect for laying on the couch or in bed.
A phone definitely works in that case as well, but the tiny screen isn't as nice for reading and watching video. Not to mention by the end of the day my phone is usually mostly dead and its time to put it on the charger for tomorrow. So trying to use my phone in bed while its attached to a charger is annoying. The tablet meanwhile is charged up (and usually lasts a full week for me between charges, even during heavy Netflix usage).
I suspect you're being down voted because article is discussing the merits between 3 devices, PC's, tablets, and phones, with the conclusion that phablets are the win in the end (with some fairly feeble 'evidence'). The fact that all three affect some peoples circadian rhythm isn't overly valuable to the conversation. Form factor is the discussion, and you're talking about light sensitivity in insomniacs. Water is a solid at -30c at sea level is also true, regardless of whether people down vote me. And neither are relevant to the article or the discussion being had.
I dunno. I put in pretty long coding days, pretty much every day. The first thing I do when I get home is, turn on my desktop.
I loved my iPad when I first got it, but now it's relegated to an overly expensive kindle. I actually like to do things on my computing devices. Play (non-casual) games, do some stupid cat Photoshop, start a hobby project(right now it's a tower defense engine in the now defunct XNA). Tables can't support any of that.
Now we've got "phablets," which are bad at being phones (awkward and clumsy to carry around, and almost impossible to operate with one hand) and bad at being tablets (small screen for a tablet, inherently greater limitations on battery life)... ><
I have a non-geek friend who has a Note. She loves it.
She's already used to having to charge her phone every night, because while her old phone might've lasted 2-3 days it was easier just charging it every night.
She holds it two-handed, portrait, to text and interact with facebook, and did with a smaller phone too because she can type much faster that way.
She's comfortable reading on it.
It fits in her pockets fine.
I prefer my Nexus 4 + Nexus 7 as an approach, but for a bunch of people, yes, yay.
Really? You sound like most tech journalists two or three years ago, when the original Galaxy Note came out. They were sure embarrassed a couple months later when they turned out to be completely wrong about how popular it would be.
Try getting out of the iPhone bubble for a while - you'll find that in the real world, phablets are not just something that you make fun of.
I don't have an iphone. I have an Android phone which is larger (65mm width) than an iphone 5, but decidedly smaller than a phablet.
My phone is just on the edge of one-hand usability (I can mostly manage it but sometimes things get pretty awkward) and I often wish I had something iphone-sized instead, but choice is pretty limited among smaller Android phones (they exist, but tend to be old/slow/etc).
People I know with phablets use them like tablets (almost always with two hands etc). That's fine if you want a small tablet, but it isn't really an adequate replacement for a traditional smartphone. They're just different things.
It's a pretty important one, though. I have a Nexus 4 and if not for the big price difference and the fact that I wanted a phone without a contract, I would've gotten an iPhone instead. And one of the primary reasons is one-handed usability, because that is the primary use case for me. If I can comfortably use two hands, and if I want to, I'll use my tablet...
Based on observing people use their phones (as well as personal experience using mine), I think it's reasonable to say that one-handed operation is important for many people in various common usage situations.
E.g., I see huge numbers of people standing on the train using their phone with one hand (while hanging onto a strap with the other) or walking down the street, using their phone with one hand (while carrying a bag with the other), etc.
Sure, and there will likely be a big market for 6" phones for a good while to come - at least until EEG/eye-tracking controlled smart glasses replace them.
That said, I don't want a 6" phone. My Nexus 5 is too big. Just a bit smaller, and I'd be able to use it comfortably one-handed. I'd go 4" over 5" if there was an option with the price and performance I want, though 4.3" or 4.5" is probably perfect for me.
I have medium-small hands, and the Nexus 5 is hard to use one-handed. I made a case for it out of carbon fiber, and that improved things slightly by adding a bezel that sticks out from the screen by 1 mm or so. Its height is also at the upper end of what I want in my pockets. Unfortunately, the iPhone 5S is the only current/recent high-spec smartphone I know of that's the size I want, and I don't like iOS. When is Sony going to offer the Z1f outside Japan?
Agreed. I'll even go as far as saying that away from work, my Nexus 7 quickly became my primary device. I dread sitting down at the laptop if I'm away form the office.
The existence of the tablet has (indirectly) made me more productive at work, too: Rather than reading articles that come through my RSS feed when I'm working (which is a vice of mine), I just add any interesting items to my Pocket queue, and read it that night (or later in the week) when relaxing at home. Not because I don't want to read the article right away (I usually want to)—but because I actually prefer to read on the tablet.
> My love affair with the tablet isn't over: I love how it lets me browse the web, read books and magazines, and watch videos in bed after a long day. That's probably how most people use their tablets — secondary devices, mainly for entertainment.
In order to argue the author's point you would also need to be carrying around a 5" phone. He is pointing out the trend of more people using their phones for what they used to use their tablets for. I'd be interested to know if you have a 5" phone and whether or not you think it replaces the features of your tablet in any way.
Speaking for myself, no, my smartphone does not replace my tablet. The amount of screen realestate lost when going from 11" to 5" is just too much. It makes reading hard (particularly with less than perfect eyesight), movies too small, and all of the real time communication that comes with a phone is vying for my attention all the time.
Now then, if I could make calls over a bluetooth headset connected to my iPad, I'd drop my phone in a heartbeat...
I'm with you on that. Though actually my thinking is increasingly "dumbphone + tablet". Where the phone gets carried when I absolutely, positively, must be in contact (and the less that happens the better).
My Note II (and now Note III) completely killed my tablet use... or more properly put, replaced it. With the stylus and multitasking, feels more like a small tablet with phone capabilities.
My various tablets are now nearly permanently attached to my computers. I need them for writing / testing software, but that is mostly all they do these days, don't carry them around the house much, never carry them out of the house.
I think phablets may replace small tablets, but the real question is whether large tablets will replace laptops/desktops. That's where the growth market is for tablets if the software becomes powerful enough.
Not to mention that curling up with a small laptop the size of an iPad (MacBook Air 11'') is even more ergonomic because it has a built-in stand and doesn't need a cover. Close to the same weight, same size as an iPad, but a full laptop.
have you ever tried using a laptop in bed , in a similar position to if you were reading a book? It kinda sucks (yes, even the 11'' air). Tablets replace magazines, not computers (at least in the "position in which you're using it" category).
Why would you want a stand if you're going to hold it anyways?
In bed, I often lay on my side with my tablet locked to portrait orientation but it is standing horizontally with respect to the bed. This way, I don't need to support it with my hands to read, only need to use my hands when I need to scroll or pick something new to read.
My sentiment too, especially with airplay/chromecast (I use both iOS and Android), the value of the tablets is only going up for me. I happen to prefer Nexus 7 over iPad for reading books, but besides that iPad is my go-to device for non-work consumption.
With FaceTime use especially, iPhone form factor is not great. Same can be set for my old Galaxy Nexus with hangouts. iPad/Nexus 7 do way better in that department. iPad Air weight and form factor is especially better then the old iPad.
There is a whole gradient of mobile devices, from small PMPs to full-sized tablets. They all are essentially the same thing in different scales. The article seems to be saying that the use case for tablets is being supplanted by larger phones.
> The article seems to be saying that the use case for tablets is being supplanted by larger phones
... which seems a fairly silly thing to say. The exact same factors which attract people to larger phones -- bigger screen, bigger battery, other things like CPU power that more space helps with -- are also going to make "tablets" more attractive than "phablets" for some people and/or some situations (e.g., like many people, I have a "home tablet" which sits around my house, but I don't try to carry it around in my pocket).
I think phablets have a place as the very-small portable end of the tablet market, but they aren't a good replacement for traditional smartphones, because they're just too awkward. So the argument that they're a "good enough" one-device alternative to both phones and tablets doesn't seem very strong (it will certainly be true for some people, but it will not be true for many others).
[If you look at people using phablets, they tend to use them exactly like tablets: two hands for operation (whereas traditional smartphones work great with one), putting them down when not in use (people often just hold their phone), putting them in a bag instead of in a pocket, etc. They're tablets.]
Although I own three tablets, my love affair with the tablet as it exists today never really took off the same way it did for so many consumers. The primary reason is that I do not believe that tablets should be first-class computing devices. Tablets, and in my opinion, the entirety of what we today call "mobile," should be subservient to a general computing model of personal omnipresent applications [1]. Put more concretely, I should only have one e-mail application, one web browser, one IM client, one media player, and all of my devices—wired, wireless, wifi, cellular, and everything in between—should be views upon those singular applications and nothing more.
So although I have three tablets because I am a technology addict, I simultaneously do not want them because I do not want additional first-class computing devices in my life.
If each additional tablet I purchased were just another input and output device—an additional view—added to my arsenal, I would buy as many as I see worthwhile to have scattered throughout my house and office. But as it is, each additional tablet (or phone or computer) is a first-class device with first-class expectations for my attention. Every device wants to be babied with application installations, updates, configuration, local data, and the works. Today's plain cloud is a meager, sticky, and altogether phony solution to this problem.
It's interesting to see this and an article about decentralizing the Internet (mischaracterized as "the web") as the top two articles at HN presently. I recently ranted [2] that Mr. Nadella should seize the opportunity to take Microsoft into a fundamentally different direction than what everyone is telling him, including himself ("mobile first, cloud first"), rather focusing on users and applications first. Particular views of applications, such as mobile or desktop or living room, are secondary matters.
I'd like to see Microsoft step up and become the only tech titan to stop following today's mobile-first, cloud-first model and swing the pendulum back to self-control with technology serving users, not companies.
I agree with you (especially about Microsoft.) I've been saying for years that there is a killer opportunity for Microsoft in the enterprise: develop a single platform for serving applications that serves a tablet view to tablet users, a desktop view to desktop users and a mobile view to mobile users. Basically, enable the hell out of BYOD because the PC is disappearing. They can make the money they lose in Windows licenses back on the server side: if the PC industry is pushing all the workload and complexity to the server, the costs should go there as well.
Basically, it should be RDP/VDI but the entire interface adjusts to the device you're using it on. They have a great touch interface in the Metro (or whatever they're calling it) -- their mistake was forcing users with a mouse and keyboard to use it as well. I suspect that a lot of Microsoft's tablet shenanigans have been because they were trying to make the Surface happen. IMO the better tactic for them to take would have been "We don't care what platform you access your business applications from, as long as your app servers are running Windows."
Which is basically exactly what you're saying. So I agree with you.
I've personally been thinking along the same lines. We may be thinking about the personal cloud. Bringing the application server to the user allows us to provide thin clients, reestablish personal security, and drive consumers to buy more advanced hardware for their core infrastructure. It would require a big change in how things are done today, but I think it would ultimately end up helping the industry.
I've been saying for years that there is a killer opportunity for Microsoft in the enterprise: develop a single platform for serving applications that serves a tablet view to tablet users, a desktop view to desktop users and a mobile view to mobile users.
My startup is doing things that way (although not for Microsoft products, obviously). Being able to create an 'app' that is write once, run well on Desktop/Tablet/Mobile, with efficient UIs on all of them, is pretty dang useful, at least in the business market.
Yeah; but the biggest problem you'll encounter in launching this is that you're not Microsoft. Microsoft has an extensive partner sales network and a lot of companies already using many of its infrastructure products. They write the SDKs and IDEs that developers use to develop Windows apps. They write the software that the system admins run on the servers. They write the security policy management systems that most companies use to manage their users, applications and hardware. And they also write the most popular desktop applications so they can show people how to really implement something like this.
I don't think anyone other than Microsoft can realistically do this. Which is exactly why Microsoft should; it's a product that nobody could copy and they would have a 90% market share on corporate BYOD management in under 5 years. Nadella is the right guy to actually push something like that forward; I just hope that the shiny consumer stuff doesn't remain a distraction. There's nothing fundamentally cannibalistic about someone running MS Outlook on their iPad: in order to do this, they still need a Windows user license, an Exchange license and an Outlook license, so MS is still getting paid three times for that user.
I've never been able to get my thoughts to fall in line before reading this. I have absolutely no use for a tablet with a powerful PC and android phone, I just never really knew why I didn't have a use for one.
It's one more commitment in my life. I need to make sure it's up to date, I have to install and tweak my settings, I have to make sure that it works the way I want it to first. THEN I get to actually enjoy it. I have to make sure that what someone else has determined I want actually becomes what I want.
I've always thought this is what I wanted too, and until now, never thought that maybe this makes the Chromebook the right platform going forward. Though still 'first class citizen' machines, they're probably the thinest client available, which kinda gets to where we're going.
This is where I am now. I have been lucky enough to get started on a Chromebook for free and have expanded from there. For me, the Chromebooks and tablets are ways for me to access webapps, particularly Google Apps. Additionally, Chromebooks have a fully-featured SSH terminal built on NaCl and a remote desktop app in form of Chrome Remote Desktop. For me, they are just windows into my cloud applications and back to my full-featured workstations (both home and work). I don't feel restricted by them except in the rare cases where I don't have access to the internet, which is increasingly rare, and even then the Google Apps are working better and better offline.
My tablets I mostly use as a web browser, an email client, an eReader and a remote control for my television. They really aren't the way I want to work, just sometimes a good form-factor for relaxing.
Rob Pike seems to share your dream, at least in part:
What hardware do you use?
A bunch of Macs at home, Macs and Linux at work, plus of course the Google compute clusters. When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon. (...)
What would be your dream setup?
I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.
That's a good point, and that's why the plain Kindle is more appealing to me. The fact that it syncs automaticall, and it's dumb (only good for one thing) makes it more useful.
A few weeks back I saw here on HN a very enterprise-y looking service (from Amazon, if I recall correctly) that allowed employees to access company applications (think pre-configured versions of Word etc.) from whatever device they had available. It was like the next-generation VPN, which sounds like what you're getting at.
I'd like to see much better integration between devices, but I also don't want them arbitrarily limited to dependence on a server.
A couple of sibling comments have mentioned Google's stuff, but really, while something like Chromecast is a big step forward, it is still a feature missing from large screens, not a real product. The problem is that manufacturers are more interested in crap like 'content partners' than they are in making integration easy.
Incidentally, I too was intrigued by Chromecast [1] and the similar Miracast because these are technologies that dance awfully close to where user interface push and pull should go. But they are constrained by narrow thinking, leaving them frustratingly limited and merely bite-size demonstrations of what multi-device life should look like. Both only push views, and are only read-only without a whole lot of context adaptation.
There is an interesting commonality here, everyone "grew up" with computers. Tablets aren't computers, they are smart displays, and that dissonance seems to grind sometimes.
The Kindle/Nook concept of a tablet is pretty straightforward, keep it as cheap as possible and let be your portal into a bunch of pre-created content. I used my iPad and my Nook HD this way, I've got 45 books I carry around in my messenger bag that used to sit on the shelf at home. I've got over a 150 datasheet/appnote/technical manuals in PDF form which works ok on "large" (>= 9") screens. I've got Evernote to index stuff and 1dollarscan to convert things that I can't purchase in a compatible format. I've got a few thousand hours of music I like which I can stream to headphones to keep the noise of the world out.
That is the stuff tablets are really good at. I've got a Lenovo laptop to do code development and computing on. I don't bother trying to do that stuff on a tablet because it makes no sense to me.
A long time ago, people would have a room in their house just to hold the books and references they needed. That became less useful when information was available on the network, but it has become useful again as the network information has become polluted and sometimes vanishes inexplicably. The key though is having an indexing system, which Evernote seems to be a good start at.
My main interest in tablet apps is for recording, editing, and synthesizing sound, a task for which there is a rich app ecosystem. Of course they're computers, even if you you personally prefer to use them mainly as displays. Of course, I can do those tasks on a larger scale and with better quality on a desktop/laptop computer, but as an aesthetic matter, that means putting the computer at the center of things which I prefer not to do. A tablet offers a moderate amount of computer power in a particularly accessible form factor that's (figuratively) lightweight enough to use as an adjunct device in the studio.
Surface Pro obviously, but the concept of a highly-accurate stylus has become standard in Galaxy Note and Galaxy Tab as well. Android now supports multiple users and multiple accounts (Windows8 and WinRT always supported this feature).
There is no reason why Tablets _can't_ evolve into general purpose computing devices. It is simply a Human-computer interaction problem.
AutoCAD has listed touch-support. The future of content creation can be revolutionized by tablets, if only we had open enough minds to see the potential.
That clip is 1.5 minutes long. I can handle any annoying thing for a minute and a half. But I can not see any way that would be sustainable for an entire day (week, years) of coding. I doubt I will ever give up my physical keyboard.
Your drawing example makes perfect sense though. We started with the Wacom tablets and such since it very closely matched what it was like to draw on paper. But there was a certain amount of disconnect since the drawing surface was separated from the actual image you saw. So it makes sense that the next step would be to draw directly onto the display.
The AIDE programming environment was more of a proof of concept video, rather than an actual methodology to programming. No, we cannot program effectively on tablets with touch / pen yet. However, I bet that we will one day create a UI design program on the tablet (drag and drop perhaps? Gesture based?) that is more natural.
At least, more natural for programming tablet applications.
There is a major advantage when you can do the whole compile / link / debug process on a single device. When the programming cycle becomes compile / link / upload / debug, you lose a bit of productivity.
Besides, many tablets support a dock by now. Transformer book, T100, Galaxy series... even iPads have those crappy Bluetooth keyboards that go kaput whenever the 2.4 GHz spectrum gets overloaded. (No seriously, a dock makes things much better).
So at the end of the day, yes, a tablet that is a tablet 99% of the time, but then you can just plug in a keyboard, or perhaps use a docking device, is frankly the future.
It is much easier to keep one master device, rather than a Tablet, Laptop, and Desktop. If one device can satisfy all of those without issue, then it will replace all three... much like how the Smartphone replaced the Rolodex, PDA and cellphone.
Exactly. Which is why I said I doubt I'll ever give up my physical keyboard. It doesn't have to be attached... it just needs to be real (not virtual). :)
One of the challenges of stylus' and tablets are the technology just isn't there. I've not tried the Note yet but the Wacom stylus on the IREX Illiad V2 has been the closest thing to what I want, my current best approximation is the JotScript and its not there yet in terms of lag or accuracy. So much to get right, and so cheap to just use a pen to draw in a notebook.
I agree with you that there is probably some sort of evolution that will work, but its not there yet for me.
Wacom has been making styluses for many years. They have perfected the art, and their best-of-the-best perfectly mimics the most complicated and intricate of pen movements. (including pen angle, rotation, thousands of levels of pressure sensitivity, multi-pen and so forth).
The Surface Pro and Galaxy Note use the cheaper "Bamboo" class Wacom styluses, which "only" have thouands of levels of pressure sensitivity. (but fail to keep pen angle and rotation in check).
Nevertheless, if you've only used iPad crap styluses, you're in for a treat. Both the Surface Pro and Galaxy Note know whether or not your "finger" is on the screen, or if it is a stylus. In fact, you can use both. Your palm does NOT mess up the advanced Wacom styluses on these tablets. Its totally on a different league than JotScript.
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Anyway, the stylus is only one more tool that I hope will become standard issue for tablets. But that isn't the part that matters. What is important is for Tablets to continue to accelerate and become more and more useful.
Before the past couple of months... Tablets were nothing but toys. They were as you said, but portable screens with a little bit of smarts to them.
But the industry is moving on. They are marching towards progress, and eventually, content creation will become a real thing.
If you need a little bit of imagination to take you where we're going... it is currently possible (with enough hardware / software), to capture an object with the Surface Pro's camera, import those images into a 3d model, manipulate the model and then print it using the Makerbot 3d Printer.
I never really got tablets - too big to be portable and crippled by the lack of usable input devices. My 11" Macbook Air is just about as portable as an iPad, but is way easier to use, not just for streaming, but even for coding, etc. Of course, I've been wrong about things before and I'm not really a typical consumer user, but I just can't imagine a future for tablets with phones getting as good as they are, and small laptops being as slim and powerful as they are.
It's mind-blowing to see a 3 year old use one better than their parents.
I don't think tablets will ever replace laptops, but that's not the point of consumption is it. They'd rather you buy a laptop for "work" a tablet for "consumption" and a phone, and...
I got my mum one a couple of years ago and she's hooked. She literally doesn't leave the house without it if she's going anywhere that involves some manner of waiting. Touch input is something far more intuitive to someone in her generation (so it seems with my meager sample size of one) than mouse/menu-driven input. Granted, I still have to occasionally show her how to perform certain actions on the device, but save for the first few weeks, that's now quite rare.
I think the thing with tablets is that they function for some adults as a replacement for casual use--browsing, e-mail, videos, etc; a consumption device, as you stated--but not for content creation. My mum still uses her computer to send e-mail, for instance, but everything else she does on her tablet. Maybe it's because she's a touch typist, but I suspect there's something about a keyboard that's a very difficult thing to replace.
>Touch input is something far more intuitive to someone in her generation (so it seems with my meager sample size of one) than mouse/menu-driven input
I would imagine most people find touch input more intuitive than mouse input, if only for the reason that it accomplishes the same thing but better(at least on an intuitive level).
A mouse is like a pair of chopsticks. Sure, after a while, you can coordinate it pretty well, but it's still a lot easier to build a house of cards directly with your hands than with chopsticks.
I desperately want every screen to be a touch screen. There is no more direct way of the "indicate something on a screen " action than touching it. Even precision issues due to fingers being pretty big usually get solved through decent heuristics or new gestures.
The only place that's still iffy is text editing. But even there some things (rapidly , but roughly, going to a spot in your text) that could be a great help.
With enough of a screen, text editing is not bad either. I didn't realize how terribly I wanted a touch screen for work until I worked with excel on a touch screen with a keyboard. It was unbelievably fast. With my left hand I could poke cells, the equation and scream around doing that. Meanwhile, my right hand was typing letters and numbers. It was like the first time I heard the Beatles. I was laughing to myself while working on the departmental budget.
It was so good that I sit at my desk at work now and just grump at the damned stupid screen.
Interesting. I'd never considered spreadsheet use, but that sounds like an area worth exploring for touch-based interaction. For some things, reaching out and "grabbing" (for lack of a better term) seems to be a more natural gesture than trying to isolate whether the UI expects left click, right click, or some permutation of drag + clicking.
I wonder now how much cross over will eventually occur between keyboard + touch interaction. One for input, one for manipulation. In essence, that merges the best of both worlds.
I've considered this. Multi-touch would be great for this. Pinch horizontally to shrink the selection, anti-pinch (I've never really though about what that motion of moving your fingers apart would be called) to expand the selection. Pinch vertically to be able to drag it around and drop it where you want.
I can't wait for a 28" touchscreen at my desk with some software to make the touch interface and excel, CSS and other random statistics programs work together a little better. It will genuinely make work easier, and make me more productive.
On the other hand a mouse is more efficient for pointing at things than anything else I tried - touching the screen, touchpad, etc... it's why when I'm working on my laptop, even though being on a MacBook I have a pretty good touchpad, I'm still attaching a mouse.
Same goes for the keyboard - no matter how big the screen real-estate is, it doesn't beat a physical keyboard, because a physical keyboard gives a tactile feel to your fingers and thus you can do touch-typing. My wife doesn't do touch-typing, she's just an ordinary user, but even she complains that things are hard to type on her 11 inch iPad.
Indeed there are applications that are more productive with a touchscreen, coupled with the possibility of carrying them around and looking at the screen while walking, it's a good combination - but for very different things.
It's not only the touch input, but the simplified model of how apps work in general. "One app running at the time and filling the whole screen." That matches the mental model of the most people. Traditional multitasking window GUI can be really confusing for people who have not grown with it,
I agree. I think that even for people who have some exposure to multitasking GUIs, a simplified UI can alleviate much of the mental overhead if they have a very specific goal in mind. In my mum's case, she has quite a lot of previous experience with computers, so her tablet is mostly for reading, looking up things of interest, watching videos or movies, etc. But as a consequence, her computer is relegated mostly to content creation.
I think that's a fantastic use case for tablets, too. Older users (60+) can benefit tremendously from their relatively small form factor and simplified UI; it's just a shame that they're largely neglected and under-served when you examine most of the advertising...
Yes it is, but as you said, a 3 year old isn't trying to get work done. What we need to see is how the kids first using phones from 7 years ago are doing with tablets and their ilk now in school. That's your earliest cohort of 10 year olds first exposed to the iPhone.
Yes, and watching tv or reading a book you are also not getting any work doen. What's the point? Computers are no longer just about getting work doen. For many, computers are more about entertainment and communication, than about work.
I've long argued that we, as tech folks, are not the target for tablets. The target for tablets are the Facebook Messenger folks. the people who want to watch videos and surf the web, chat with others, etc.
You know, the same folks Dell was able to con into paying $600 for a computer that needed GeekSquad to fix it every six months because computers are so unfriendly to non-technical people.
Tablets, especially ones with curated app stores, solve that problem. And people who are not techies love that.
True. Many of the comments nearby (personal testimonials) are missing the point.
If we're talking about the tablet market, we do need to talk about kids, grandma, and average people who want to be entertained. Not nerd hobbyists who are frustrated by the shortcomings of tablets relative to general-purpose computers.
These feelings matter to us, but in a discussion of the market, they are irrelevant.
I have a 3 year old, he likes my iPad, but I don't get the fascination of people with children that are "using one better than their parents".
Are they using it for anything useful? Are they reading emails? Are they browsing websites? Can they search YouTube for their favorite cartoons or songs? So what the hell are we talking about anyway? Moving stuff around the screen and opening their favorite game? I don't see how that's in any way fascinating.
My son likes to draw on the iPad btw. But he's way more happy when we draw things pencil on paper. Just something to consider - being able to use a device, doesn't make it useful.
My 6 year old daughter has an iPad 1 which she appropriated from mum. She has taught me gestures that I didn't know about, and that you can click the button twice to get a menu of running apps and shut down ones that are slowing things down. She figured out on her own, that the URLs announced on the kids TV channels can be typed into the browser and she works her way through these sites, saves high scores, wins prizes (pages to print and colour) and so on.
Just yesterday something new came up on one channel and she grabbed her iPad to look up that channel's schedule page to see if it was a schedule change or just a short that they sometimes play between programs.
And she draws all kinds of stuff in a kind of story mode, kind of like the way the Olympics opening ceremony unfolds a story. And she plays some games (only free ones and I decide what to install). These aren't drawings that she saves, because she is continually erasing and redrawing, but sometimes she does draw things and saves them into the gallery. I downloaded a selection of free drawing apps based on review sites that list stuff like X Great Apps for Kids.
She sets up reminders for events in her life including school field trips. Personally I never use calendaring programs so she just figured this out on her own. And she worked her way through Settings experimenting and asking questions about anything that she did not understand.
What drawing apps have you installed that you can recommend?
The one I found for my son is terrible - sluggish and shows an annoying top banner serving ads completely unrelated to kids or drawings.
Two weeks ago, I went to a birthday party for a kid we know. His dad works for google and there are a lot of tablets in the house. I was outside eating barbeque, then went inside, and not hearing any noise, went into the kids playroom thinking they were all asleep. All five were sitting on the sofa playing the same game of minecraft. There was a nexus 7 on the floor that had evidently been drained of battery. My son had plugged his in (I carry a micro-usb cord and converter in my pocket for events like this). Their ages: 5 to 9.
They played for an hour solid, only speaking to each other to discuss in-game stuff, like: how do you make arrows, or who has strings...
For me the form factor is better for any situation where I don't have a table to set a laptop on and my primary task is consuming data. In public transit, in bed, etc.
If I have to enter data tablets are pretty much always out as I hate on screen keyboards and getting an extra one means you might as well just get an ultraportable laptop and if I have a tablet to set something on the benefit to form factor doesn't come into play since I'm not holding the device.
>I never really got tablets - too big to be portable and crippled by the lack of usable input devices.
Surfing and reading on the crapper. No need for input devices.
Well, and tons of other stuff besides, depending on your age and interests. Almost every niche, from astronomy geeks to musicians has lots of great apps for tablets.
Entry to mid-level director? Tons of filming assistance can happen on a tablet, from storyboards to digital clappers.
Musician? Guitar tuner, practice accompaniment, guitar amp emulation (with a small adapter), audio recording, synth engine, notation display and tons of other stuff.
Graphic designer? Tons of high quality drawing apps, from bitmap to vector to natural style brushes.
Photographer? Tethered shooting, library management and rating your shots post-shoot, etc.
The list goes on depending on your interests, work and hobbies. Those are just areas relevant to mine.
And of course the core utilities for everyone: writing, snapping photos, web surfing, reading books, reading comics, doing calculations, keeping notes, watching movies, office apps, etc etc.
Are the D/A converters of tablets really that good? Honest question since I have no idea. From my limited experience, there is a huge difference between inbuilt ones and something external that sends the converted signal to the 'puter via USB or firewire... or is that just because desktops have a lot more interference? GPU, CPU, the fact that it's plugged into an electrical socket etc... but I imagine a tablet with everything crammed real close together might have similar problems... ?
> Photographer? Tethered shooting, library management and rating your shots post-shoot, etc.
For tethered shooting I can see how portable instant feedback for persons you're photographing, or things you're photographing for other people, would be super nice. But full-blown library management? Again, I never tried it, but I just can't imagine doing it without a keyboard and mouse, since I need to be able to tweak the RAW conversion settings; pretty much all photos look bad straight out of the camera, so to know if something might be a keeper I need to make at least rough adjustments. That is also a lot more fun (read: less horrible) with a decent CPU... of course, if you're on the road it would be way better than nothing, but for most of my use, I'd rather wait until I get home and then do it better and quicker.
You can get external A/D/A converters, some of which are designed to just plug in to a tablet via a USB or proprietary connector, some of which are designed to house the tablet entirely, eg http://www.alesis.com/iodock
That said, even cheap converters are pretty good. Bear in mind that state-of-the-art analog tape recording only delivers about 12 bits of fidelity.
The average consumer is not posting on a website talking about their spending behavior. The lot of us may be "average" with things like, say, automotive purchases and whatnot, but given that this website has a tech slant, it's fair to say he's not the average consumer, at least not when it comes to consumer electronics.
What I really should have said was that whenever I use myself as an example of the "typical consumer", I'm inevitably making a wrong decision based on some idiosyncrasy.
Most laptops are not macbook airs. Purely from a lack of required maintenance point of view, an iPad is a huge step up from an equivalently priced PC for someone who just needs email Facebook and web.
iPads are particularly big tablets; your Air certainly isn't as portable as my Nexus 7. I can carry it on my pocket (which means I take it everywhere), take it out on the train for reading or watching a video without losing the details of the picture, do a quick SSH to a server without needing to sit at a table or scroll endlessly, etc.
They don't replace my laptop, but for my family members, a tablet per person plus a single home desktop is enough to replace a laptop per person.
The initial tablet market struck me as a very boomer focused device, one that made computing easy for a limited subset of tasks.
I think he's wrong that tablets have peaked. As the software and hardware on tablets catches up to the capability of a full laptop, they are a much more compelling device for use at home or at work. Content creation, software development and file management are still a challenge but these can be fixed.
I really hope the Surface and derivatives catch on in the enterprise, because I'm tired of lugging a 7lb laptop to and from meetings.
I'm a Linux user and very much addicted to the CLI. For any kind of work, a tablet isn't really right for me. I'm getting by okay with two laptops at the office: An MBP that weighs at least 7 lbs and a 2.2 lb ThinkPad. All my work stuff is on my MBP which stays on my desk. I take my ThinkPad to meetings, and if I need to reference something off the MBP I simply ssh into it. That would be a pain without a keyboard.
So being a Linux CLI guy puts me at something like 1% of computer users. I agree that the tablet content creation interface can be fixed for most of the rest of the 99%. I expect that soon the only distinction between a tablet and a laptop is whether or not the keyboard is attached.
I am very much a Linux user and addicted to the CLI and my plethora of tools, doing heavy work (like compilation) on servers. I buy the lightest computing devices as I don't really need anything with a lot of processing power; so battery life and actual weight win it for me. I had a heavy MBP before I bought a Chromebook and I don't see me ever doing that again. As for tablets; I like to have them laying around for content consumption but for everything else I really do need a keyboard and I don't really know how that could be replaced. I tried the keyboards on tablets (including the surface 2) and they are a joke for coding imho.
I wonder if there'd be any market for bringing back the keyboarded smartphone in the phablet scale - that is, something that splits the difference between a Nexus 7 and a Blackberry Q10. For people who need to type standing-up but don't want a tiny smartphone.
Then again, you'd still be restricted to thumb-typing, it would be hard to come up with a sweet-spot size that allows both thumb-typing and proper keyboard touch-typing - this is something the software keyboards excel at, since you get both form-factors by rotating the device.
Legacy, mainly. You're right, I'd be just as happy with an MBA or my ThinkPad and a bunch of server space. As a CLI user, that's an easy trade-off. I suspect it's slightly more difficult for GUI users to make the transition because applications are usually written with the expectation of running on a local machine. As the GUI moves to the web it will become irrelevant.
I really liked the desktop/phone combo in the movie Her. The main character buys an "Operating System" that sort of takes over his desktop at home and at work and also his phone. I don't know that it's something we'd want to call an OS the way Windows or Linux is an OS, but there's a lot of sense to a user interface that follows you on whatever device you happen to be using.
2-in-1 PCs are great, Windows 8 notwithstanding. I just got a Thinkpad Yoga and being able to work in tablet mode when I'm stuck in cramped seat on a train or plane is fantastic. I'm also encouraged by the return of pen-based digitizers. I know it's a small niche, but for designers and artists, it's quite nice.
My yoga 2 pro has completely allowed me to replace two devices. The only possible advantage a dedicated tablet has would be size/weight, but I've yet to encounter that in my purely anecdotal usage
The problem with tablets is not that they are not useful, they are just not good enough, yet.
They should be about as heavy as a sketch book, allow input as precise as a pen on paper and preferably be foldable.
They need something like a filesystem that allows sharing documents between applications. Instead of folders I want documents organized by metadata: mimetype, a history with all times and locations at which I modified it and when I want to open one I want to see the ones I'm most likely to open right now based on whatever information the device has.
Most importantly though integration with other devices needs to be better. I want no distinction between my notebook and my tablet when it comes to accessing data. I shouldn't have to worry about backups or the contents of my hard drive, the hard drive of any device should contain an operating system and a cache and everything else I want encrypted in the cloud.
Switching from one device to the next should be seamless (as far as input methods allow.)
As it stands tablets are glorified file viewers with some limited editing facilities. What a tablet should be is a sketchbook for everything digital.
Not sure how a nearly 30% YOY increase in tablet sales for Q4 translates to a dead market, unless they thought tablets would end up as full replacements for existing systems. Few people are replacing their other computing devices for tablets, but obviously a large number of people see, and will continue to see, tablets as good secondary devices. I suspect, however, that replacement cycles for tablets will be longer than for phones (which cycle out on contracts) or PCs (driven by corporate platforming schedules).
Anecdotally, I lug around a smartphone, laptop, iPad and Kindle, but I can collapse the last three into the iPad for a lot of daily nontechnical tasks. (Hell, I can even prototype Python on it.) It's not a necessary part of my kit, but I'll keep one around for convenience alone.
I use my iPad all the time. From writing documentation to taking notes on projects I'm working on. I also use it for wire framing designs and for editing and passing on documents when I get an email and am away from my computer. I also do these things with my iPhone, but the iPad makes it a little easier with the larger screen.
So, some folks use them for one thing, and some folks use them for another thing (or not at all).
That's the story for basically every product that exists....so....
In other words, re/code is trying to build up their content by using fluff stuff like this - polarizing and gets page views by inciting flame wars.
I like tablets, but for very limited uses. They excel, especially for casual puzzle type games that respond very well to touch. For light reading they work fine as well.
Browsing the internet? Well not so great. Mobile versions of websites seem to be always wanting and a lot of web pages are too target rich making it way too easy to accidentally click on something like an advertisement or side bar thingy. And I spend too much time zooming pages and waiting for reflows as well. Overall a pretty irritating experience.
My 12 year old boy uses it as his main computing device despite having an iMac on his desk. Often times I'd walk in on him where he is reading wikipedia, watching youtube, or using it as a second screen while he plays video games. To him it is a computer and his computer is a small tv. I think it is a generation thing.
edit: and it isn't just a brand/technology thing, he uses the Surface RT that we have in the same manner. Which leads to be believe that computing should be as mobile and suited to the task as possible.
I am not surprised at all: a crippled, jailed, feudalized device that is too large to be carried in your pocket like a phone but far too limited to replace a laptop.
I don't think they'll go away. They're an acceptable "portable dumb terminal" for certain kinds of work or for people who only want web and e-mail and a few apps. They also really kick butt for point of sale terminals and similar kiosk applications.
Not so fast. Tablets have yet to impact businesses that don't even use computers much. If you're in general contracting, a waitron, a delivery person, a trucker, an auto-mechanic, a repair tech, an oil-field worker and a host of other mostly paper-based or "non-computer" workflows, the tablet will eventually enter this area. The implications of this change are through-going and only barely begun. And it's mostly driven by cost / capability factors.
Furthermore there are other businesses that are just getting started using the Tablet.
On the contrary. Tablets are finally beginning to get good.
Android Tablets support multiple users. Active stylus support is becoming natural (Surface Pro, Dell Venue Pro, Galaxy Note and Galaxy Tab Note). Tablets are beginning to treat HTML5 pages more consistently.
Its still a while out before Tablets become amazing, but I'm going to be grabbing one soon (Dell Venue Pro 8 + Active Stylus) because they're finally good enough to be on my radar.
As soon as flexible screens become a thing, your phone and your tablet become the same device; you just unfold it when you want a big screen.
In light of this, the size argument being made in this article is not really meaningful in the medium-to-long term, unless these kinds of flexible screens never happen. (But they are being actively worked on, so.)
I think this is spot on. I am not sure how long it will take but there will be a big revolution in screens, like the CRT to LCD one, in the next 20 years and it will be around flexible and expandable displays. Possibly what we know consider to be a screen will be totally changed.
I have a desktop PC, a notebook, a tablet, and a phone. All four of them were getting long of tooth -- an inevitability given the rapid pace of obsolescence. Which one did I upgrade, and why?
My phone, for two reasons:
1. I needed to upgrade my phone in order to sign up with a new provider of phone service. None of the other devices are tethered to a single (invariably evil) service provider for mainstream use.
2. Inefficiency and obsolescence such as sluggish performance carried the highest price on the phone, because my need for the phone occurs in awkward situations such as getting from A to B in my car, or deciding which product to buy in the store.
If these are widespread patterns, then the result will be that the slickest, newest computers in the typical household will be phones.
Adding myself tove the crowd "still in love \w my tablet" :)
My work laptop stays at work.
At home, I have one windows machine, with steam and nothing else.
Youtube, movies, articles, pdf-s, music ... all in my nexus7.
I stilll even use my kindle for reading longer texts (20+ pages)
Maybe the reason for all this, is that I am still in love with my nokia 3720c dumbphone :P Battery on standby for a week, water, dust and shock resistant.
So in general, you are probably right, for most people in the near future, smart-phone will be their primary personal computing device and laptop their work-horse.
But there will be people like me, wanting to have their computing capabilities more fine-grained.
I rarely use the keyboard on my laptop. The laptop is part of a larger setup that involves a larger external monitor (with the laptop screen being the secondary display) and a wireless keyboard and mouse. I would love it if the laptop was just a tablet "docked" to connect to the monitor and keyboard/mouse. Then I could easily undock the tablet and use it as a tablet when I wanted to. But then plug it back in for a more "traditional PC" feel. Obviously it needs to be powerful enough for me to get my work done... and it would need to run the apps I need to get my work done.
Interestingly enough, you've pretty much described Microsoft's Surface / Surface Pro. I think, debacle about the x86 vs ARM (Win RT) confusion aside, they're onto something with the form factor and expandability.
My current personal use laptop is less than a year old. I'm hoping by the time I need to replace it things will have settled down a bit with the Surface... or some other device that fits the description comes along.
The more subtle point here about phablets being the death of tablets is, in my experience, dead on. People still addicted to their 7inch+ tablets simply haven't used a phablet.
I spent last year being much more impressed by single purpose devices anyway. Stuff like the latest eink Kindles, the Chromecast and so on. Curiously they all follow the same push style of content delivery, where it is pushed from the network to the device for focused consumption, and I can't help thinking this is the future.
I bought a tablet for travel because I don't really care if I have a smart phone or not. I didn't really think it would replace things with keyboards and I still really like it for travel.
The real problem is that cross device integration is so awful, hopefully the future has us configuring environments instead of devices (environment there being the software I want to see when I look at a small touch screen or the software I want to see when I look at a large screen with a keyboard).
I think the battery life is the one thing tablets are still great for, if I traveled a lot I'd consider owning one for long media playback sessions a necessity
I wonder how much of a factor the decline of middle class spending is affecting the tablet consumer space. A phone is a more necessary gadget. A tablet could be considered a luxury item. Maybe people just can't fit them in their budget?
My iPad is the my primary device for reading technical books, RFCs, and other PDFs. It is often an accessory to when I am working on my laptop. Rather than two different screens, one for development and one for reference info, the iPad fills that role.
It is also typically what we use for watching movies at night while heading to bed -- we have a decent digital media library.
I don't see the affair as being over, maybe the tablets people have are good enough for their current uses.
I kind of agree and disagree. I think tablets are here to stay and will be the dominant form of computing device. As their price hits < $100 they are going to be everywhere. The problem is, they are going to be boring - glorified magazine readers. Their ultimate contribution to what we can do with our devices in terms of novelty is going to be incredibly marginal.
Along the same lines, I think Apple has harmed the long term success for tablets by refusing to embrace a stylus (I seem to remember "if you see a stylus you failed" type remark?). After acquiring a Note 3 it truly transforms the device - it's the "other half" of interaction that I have been missing. I could never bring myself to type on a tablet in a meeting. Whether it's just a social construct or not, I don't know - but I can write without feeling rude, but not type. So many things I can sketch out with the "real" stylus but could never do with a capacitive version. I have realized that my Note3 is the perfect device for doing math. I mark up PDFs. I pull it out any time I need more accuracy than the touch interface will provide. I'm seriously contemplating now buying an 8" note just for the stylus function.
I have to agree with that. We pretty much all grew up before touchscreens were widely available as they are now, and as such I think the allure of them was in their novelty. The more I use touchscreens, the more I realize how inefficient and inconsistent they tend to be (at least, the ones I've used).
I feel the opposite. Whenever I'm using a computer without a touch screen and the screen is close enough to touch (or in a convenient location to touch), I have to fight instinct to touch the screen. Sometimes it's just easier (for me at least) to jab your finger at the thing you want to click on than it is to move the mouse to it.
I think it's really context-sensitive. Some things work best with a touchscreen, I suppose. I do know one thing - I'd probably rather beat myself to death with a tablet than try to program (or type anything at all, for that matter) on it.
My iPad does sit around at home, waiting for me to test out some new UI, but my Nexus 7 has replaced my phone altogether. I don't really make personal calls, but I do a ton of casual reading and email. While the phone is nice to have for the occasional call, the smaller form factor tablet works best for me day-to-day.
If I could use a small Bluetooth headset to make calls through Google Voice, I'd happily ditch the phone forever.
This is silly. Expectations for phones and tablets are crazy, specifically when talking about apple.
I read things daily that say apple is done for talking about both phones and tablets. The market share numbers aren't THAT important when we are talking about numbers as big as we are. In the mid 90's, when Microsoft "Won" and Apple lost the global PC market was ~50 million. Apple alone sold more tablets than that last year, and they sold more phones than that last quarter.
They don't have to sell 200 million tablets and phones per quarter. Apple is going to die or get crushed because Android has more market share, and tablets aren't going away either.
The only reason tablet sales haven't gone to the moon like some people predicted, is that they misunderstood the replacement cycle. It's not something that needs to be replaced every year or two like a phone. My iPad 2 is still just fine. I would love to have an iPad air because it is nicer, but the functionality is pretty much the same. In another year or two it might get to the point where i want/need to upgrade. But that is 4-5 year replacement cycle, not 1-2.
Xerox PARC. "tabs, pads, and boards." They've experimented with these form factors. Back in the '90s.
One thing they said back then, pads -- that is, tablets -- are not something you carried around as a personal device like your phone. It would be more like the tablets on Star Trek: The Next Generation. You left it in the room. You logged in with your credentials (using your tab, the phone; or I suppose now, it would be iBeacon). When you are done with the work, you left it in the room and go elsewhere.
So you don't use it like a laptop or a phone. Duh.
It also means that, at some point, we should see multi-user tablets where settings, files, etc. sync over the cloud, combined with sub-$99 tablets, that's when this kind of a workflow will start emerging.
There's a similar romantic notion related to boards -- smart TVs. Eventually, I suspect the use-cases will converge on that old Xerox PARC research. It's when we start getting interactions among the three form factors we'll start to see some interesting things.
I got an iPad about 18 months ago. Since then I've not used a "PC" at home, with the exception of when I use my work's laptop for doing work (programming) at home. I do everything from the tablet: browsing the web, "social" stuff, paying bills, e-mail, etc.
I mostly disagree with the article. True, I do watch Netflix on my Android Samsung Galaxy III, and it is nice, but it is nicer on an iPad mini (or full size iPad).
I keep the markdown files for my book projects in Dropbox, and while I can read them and make small edits on my phone, writing is much nicer on my iPad mini - so much so that I very often write on my iPad instead of on my MacBook Air laptop.
I don't have a separate data plan for my iPad, rather I use a mobile hotspot from my phone when necessary. Yeah, I am that cheap.
My MBA, phone, and iPad cover my needs for work, reading, watching video. I would not want to be without any of them. I largely just use my MacBook Air (with a huge external monitor) for writing code - just about everything else I prefer to do on my two smaller devices.
I think there is some truth to the article, but not that much.
Yeah, 5" devices are a nice size and make people somewhat less likely to reach for their tablet when reading. But is a 5" screen going to replace a textbook? or a magazine? or a kiosk? are people going to want to watch a movie on their phone?
It's all of the above - phones, tablets, laptops. Depends on what you are doing.
But fact is, many are now using tablets instead of laptops. Tablets are simply a more pleasant experience for causal use. And a lot of computer use is casual - reading, surfing the web, games, email, facebook.
So IMO tablets trend up in the long term, laptops trend down. But neither die.
Media's love affair with tablets is probably over. They have tried everything and not able to continue/recreate the monopoly they enjoyed with paper. Not on the web. Not on tablets.
I really don't get why people like tablets. I gave it a try with an ipad air, but I sold it. There's nothing I can do on a tablet that I can't do more efficiently on my laptop. As soon as typing is involved, the laptop is much better.
Even for things that don't involve using the keyboard, I prefer my laptop. The screen is much bigger and stays in place more easily.
Really, I don't see how anyone that knows how to use a keyboard could prefer a tablet to a laptop. The only advantage I see is portability, and ease of use for technophobics.
Well, maybe I'm getting old and can't adjust to new technology.
Actually, that's one place where I much prefer using my laptop. It's sitting on my belly, with the screen standing vertically. I just couldn't do the same with a tablet.
More and more people are switching to tablets only; almost all managers, sales people, account managers, project managers I know are not using tablets anymore but have iPads. Don't see it dying soon as these people don't need laptops and won't use laptops anymore. Then there is non professionals who all buy tablets instead of laptops; my neighbour who swore she would never buy 'a computer' now walks around with her E50 Android tablet all the time. I think sales will only go up.
It's easy to see that 5-10 years from now we will all be walking around with phablet style devices in the 5-7" form factor. Docking with a larger fixed display or external keyboard/mouse when needed.
It's been in progress for years. Talk to non-tech people today and you'll find they live their lives on smartphones/tablets. Sure they keep an old XP machine around for when they need to type something lengthy or run some old software, but that's driven by necessity not desire.
Once you hit the "content consumption from toilet" first world problem, the rest of the market actually would like a smaller device with the same connectivity.
That said, I'm a recent tablet user because with a Nexus7 and a Chromecast, my screen is actually big, 10 feet away and doesn't need me to hold it.
His main analysis is this: "It comes down to size. The vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who use tech every day are just fine with having two primary computing devices: One for your pocket and one for your desk. " And in his opinion Tablet is neither.
My guess is that he hasn't extensively used a Nexus 7 tablet. It fits fine in my front and back pockets. I used it way more than my smartphone. And I rarely have the need to pick up my 10 inch tablet.
Someone who is actually in the trenches can probably answer this but my guess is that a lot of the newest and hottest apps tend to be released for phones first and then later on a tablet version comes along. The lowest common denominator is going to be the phone since so many people have them and I have to pull it out to be able to use app X. It might not be available yet for my tablet or it is and it's not as feature-packed or as easy to use.
"PCs took a full three decades to reach market saturation, whereas tablets may have already topped off at the four-year mark."
True, but this is probably due in part to the price differential—early computers were 2x to 10x the price of early tablets, so it's not surprising that tablets reached saturation faster. I do agree with the general gist of the article, as my aging iPad 2 (which I will probably replace with the next iPad Air) can attest to.
> We teamed up with HP, Toshiba, NEC and Fujitsu, all of whom spent millions alongside Microsoft, and failed to create a bona fide category at the time. Why? “Tablet PCs,” as they were known, required a stylus (versus today’s touch-interaction model), and more importantly, only had a few tablet-optimized apps. We now know that’s a recipe for disaster.
Yeah, and even more importantly they cost $2000 to $3000, and were very big and heavy.
1. The Bad Experience cited is with Windows tablets. This ignores how hard it is to move a non-touch system to tablets.
2. He cites Netflix "losing momentum" on tablets. If this was true for media use on tablets in general, Amazon would not be pouring as much effort as they are into tablets.
Google has done a bad job marketing Android on tablets. Apple has done a great job with iPad. YMMV.
> If this was true for media use on tablets in general, Amazon would not be pouring as much effort as they are into tablets.
Amazon, unlike Netflix, is worried about being kicked out of the iOS ecosystem. Kindle (and all the other major eBook apps) already came close at least once. Unless Amazon was convinced that media use on tablets was going to collapse (not just plateau), they desperately need the deterrent and the insurance policy.
Battery life is probably as important as size for merging the tablet and phone markets. My tablet is effectively an extended battery for my phone. I could probably use my phone for everything I do on my tablet, but if I did, I'd be charging my phone 2-3 times a day.
As soon as the size gets more usable and battery life improves sufficiently, tablets will probably turn into a fringe device.
This article is saying that as people apparently migrate to larger phones they will then find tablets unnecessary.
I think there is room in the world for people to have both a small one-hand useable phone coupled with a larger multipurpose tablet. There is also room for people to buy devices like the Sony 6" phablet that works both as a phone and a "tablet."
I use my tablet (iPad 4 with LTE for $10/mo) for a fair number of specific tasks, but I prefer a laptop/desktop generally.
It rocks on planes, as a car nav system in a rental car, for reviewing applications (...), for instapaper, for bathroom computing, for reading PDFs (although sometimes I use a Kindle DX), etc.
Maybe I'm old, but using an iPhone 5S for reading long articles is kind of painful.
This is a product, the demand for which was singlehandedly created by one company. Before Apple, nobody wanted a tablet. And nobody needed a tablet. But Apple-fans would have bought anything if Steve Jobs said so. And then other people thought they wanted one too. It's much like De Boers and diamonds. Fortunately, tech fads pass rather quickly.
Why do things have to be boiled down into winner-take-all narratives? I feel that the public has no capacity for nuance anymore.
Look, the tablet has its place - usually situations that don't require high-bandwidth HIDs such as keyboards. The computer user of the future will have many devices spanning many different form factors. It's OK.
No, I think it is just beginning. I bought an iPad in 2011 and didn't even really know why, mostly because I felt I should know what's going on with this new class of device. I ended up using it all the time, and still do (though I bought a new one). The phone is too small to use comfortably for more than a short while.
I just got my first tablet in the form of a Dell Venue Pro 8 and I absolutely love it but I think a large part of it has to do with the ability to run full apps and the fact its 7in form factor lets me put it in my pocket.
Tablets used to refer to larger phones that ran the same apps but that ecosystem is hopefully changing.
They're too big to be properly portable like a phone, needing some kind of case or bag, but lack the OS, real keyboard, and general power of a laptop. Being stuck between the two doesn't seem appealing even without their general lack of mobile data capability.
My N7 is used for exactly these things, alarm clock, iTunes remote, Telldus remote (this controls lights and power outlets around the apartment) and browser for when my computer is being used by someone else or when I'm playing a game on it.
So it's not worthless, but I can easily imagine how I lived before it. :)
I really like my iPad a lot for second screen viewing. I think there is still a ton of untapped potential there (sports in particular could have all kinds of cool things built for tablets involving motion tracking). I really don't use it for anything else but movies when travelling.
After long time Smartphone user I bought a tablet last year for three reasons - and only these reasons: A browsing device for the Couch, a reader for the evening and a photo viewer (holiday photos aso.) I love it. Works great for these three things, better than a phone or notebook.
The author is right. No one wants to hold their computer for extended use. The phablet is the right compromise, it does everything a tablet does and more while still being light, small and always with you. Also, having 1 device is much less expensive and cumbersome than having 2.
I read all my comics on my tablet device. it is the perfect size screen / interface. I have the same marvel/dc app on my iphone and it's not the same experience. It tries to be, but the real estate makes it impossible to enjoy in the same fashion.
This may be accurate, for the most part, at least until voice recognition passes the turing test. Depending on when that happens, it's not clear whether we'll have input devices close enough to children's brains to bypass decorated-glass entirely.
This seems like a weirdly narrow experience to base writing off tablets in general on. It also is contradicted by the massive volume of android tablets being specifically sold as tv replacements.
Seems like he's been deluded by taking numbers out of context.
"Our" affair is over? Gee, too bad my household does not know it yet and a 2 year old laptop has been demoted to kids machine for playing Minecraft... _Our_ love affair with a PC is over. Likely will never buy again.
This is just a rehashing of the netbook. As phones get bigger and/or something else replaces the need of casual consumption in a different or more appealing form factor, we'll say bye to the tablet as well.
The original (OLPC-derived) netbook was a thing of beauty.
Once Microsoft and Intel got their claws into it, it became a cheap PC with poor inputs that didn't do anything well (by design - an ARM/Linux netbook threatened the WinTel dominance of the day).
I was an early adopter of the iPad too, but now get more use out of a very tiny MacBook Air. The laptop slimmed down to meet it, rather than the phone moving up. For me the key has been the ability to type.
Agreed. Any device that limits my ability to communicate effectively is not for me.
Also, as an avid CLI user, a tablet is next to useless for me. I don't really feel like buying a bluetooth keyboard for a tablet just to optimize text input.
I think the iPad is most efficient as a 1 way device. Great for reading and viewing, but not good for responding. Hence the airplane use call. Laptops have gotten convenient enough (and strong enough batteries) to compete though.
I can see the utility of the tablet as a browsing/reading/listening device. However, I am a bit of a curmudgeon and will clutch my laptop to myself as long as possible.
His "love affair" is over. I'm using iPad at this very moment and no I don't want it smaller. Just as light as possible. So my next will certainly be iPad Air.
It's much more human, for lack of a better word — more intimate, more ergonomic — than a PC for (browsing the web|reading ebooks or PDFs|watching videos|making video calls).