Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
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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).
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.
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).
Yay?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Overall, I agree with the article.
not for everyone though, as it emits light, and that is not what your body wants late at night. See example HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057575
edit: I'm simply indicating staring at a screen late at night might not be all that good for us humans. Downvoting this doesn't make it any less true.
Sitting upright at a desk with a reasonably sized monitor placed at arm's length is much more ergonomic than curling over a tiny glossy screen.
Why would you want a stand if you're going to hold it anyways?
Now then, if I could make calls over a bluetooth headset connected to my iPad, I'd drop my phone in a heartbeat...
What's stopping you? I do this from Hangouts (which can make calls, at least in the US.)
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.
... 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.]
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.
That is how most people use their computers.
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.
Or maybe Microsoft (with that shiny new CEO) can deliver on the streaming OS vision and truly provide I/O focused devices http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/streaming-os-micr...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, I can't seem to find the link now.
Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
Fortunately for those of us who wish to push the boundaries of computing, some companies are willing to go in that direction.
Content Creation Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCKWn1zjejE
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.
Programming on a Tablet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XmxtIDWI_E
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.
http://cadablog.blogspot.com/2013/03/whats-new-in-autocad-20...
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.
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). :)
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7191779
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.
Try the Galaxy Note 2, Surface Pro, or Wacom's own $2,500 Cintiq 24HD.
http://www.techindustriya.com/2011/11/11/wacom-launches-the-...
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.
All on nothing more than a "tablet".
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.
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...
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.
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.
Or your mother?
Seriously. It's actually kind of amazing.
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.
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.
It was so good that I sit at my desk at work now and just grump at the damned stupid screen.
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 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.
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.
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...
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...
Not once did they ask parents for help.
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.
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.
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.
Averages lie.
Show me a bell curve any day.
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.
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.
They are good enough for casual use. But you can even get stuff like Apogee interfaces for your iPad with top pre-amps D/A.
>But full-blown library management?
Not full blown, mostly marking photos from a shoot, flagging, minimal edits etc, before they end up in your main desktop library.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Data input? hehe, yeah right.
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 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.
Furthermore there are other businesses that are just getting started using the Tablet.
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.
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.)
Also makes a great e-book reader.
Definitely not a laptop replacement.
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.
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 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.
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).
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-...
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.
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 don't feel lonely, though. I have a keyboard.
You're not gonna hold your hand straight in the air for more than a 10 minute stretch.
If I could use a small Bluetooth headset to make calls through Google Voice, I'd happily ditch the phone forever.
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.
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 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.
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.
For the rest of us, it is so getting started.
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.
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.
And then there's this - http://thedoghousediaries.com/5608
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
So it's not worthless, but I can easily imagine how I lived before it. :)
Seems like he's been deluded by taking numbers out of context.
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).
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.
It isn't quite that simple but it isn't far off.
So fuck adults and don't mess with our fun.