Terminals are also 'computers' in that they have RAM and a CPU etc, but they where not independently useful.
A tablet without google, Netflix, Facebook, Pandora, etc is just far less useful to people.
A tablet without google, Netflix, Facebook, Pandora, etc is just far less useful to people.
Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts.
Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters?
Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility.
Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket.
Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching.
These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.
The phone might happen to have an on board address book and calendar, but this was not a statement about access to computation. It's a statement about cost/benefit and use cases.
What you say makes no sense. Tablets are independent computers. You don't have to be connected to the internet to make the most of it. You rely on these internet services only if you choose to. I can read a book, listen to music or watch a video without Pandora, Netflix and Co. A tablet is not a dumb terminal.
Unless your talking about taking photos / video from it, but that's another story as a cassette deck can also record and play back audio without being a computer.
Granted, you can play games with one or write notes etc, but I just mean they are mostly used as connected devices.
And that's true for any desktop or laptop as well. It doesn't make them dumb terminals either.
It's possible you could jury-rig something up for a tablet, but it's also clear the intended use is as a networked device.
Because phones and tablets don't have SD slots? or data transfer from blue tooth or NAS drives isn't a thing?
PS: iPhones and iPads don't have SD slots so for millions of these devices that do qualify as phones and tables it's really not an option.
That doesn't help making the differentiation between a terminal and a standalone computer. Computing has always been a networked thing, we just now have a transport medium that is faster than a floppy disk.
Mainframes were loading punched cards, cloud datacenters are loading user data, and tablets are loading books and video.
And the moment you annotate that PDF or manage synced documents, you are now editing content.
At least in the context that a modern PC's graphics card is not thought of as a separate computer.
The IBM 3270 on the other hand does significantly more processing on the device and dates to 1972 which would have made it well known in the late 70's computing world.
Now a 2MHz 8 bit CPU chip may not seem very powerful. But, people wrote very useful software using far less.
I make music, and for the past several years, I've been pretty much exclusively using my phone and iPad to do it. The touchscreen works very well for my use case, and the audio pipeline is quite flexible with the right apps--in many cases outshining the workflow available on a full PC. I'm working exclusively on the device and using no external services after downloading the apps themselves. That takes far more computing power than a dumb terminal.
Yes, they do processing without connection to an external system. But, unlike say a play station you can't just go to a store and buy a game without connecting your device to another system.
The only difference is the transport medium used for the computer-computer connection.
At least on Android Tablets there's also nothing really stopping me from buying a USB-stick with games and installing them, without any computers involved after the stick's creation (I would have to get a friend to create it and sell it to me, but the lack of market demand, and thus supply, is besides the point).
The reality is there are tablets are a third option between a standalone computer which could be programmed by hand and an dumb terminal.