Are tablets falling out of favour?
bbc.com
bbc.com
While much of the demand for new smartphones is without doubt driven by the perpetual improvements, much of it is also driven by theft/loss/breakage. A tablet from 3 years ago serves much of the same purpose as a tablet today, so is less likely to get replaced. There may very well be as many working tablets in circulation as smartphones.
Since then it's become pretty slow and a bit scuffed up with age (and even has a crack in one corner of the glass) but I can still use it as an ebook reader and to try out iOS-only apps as it's my only iOS device. For everything else, my other devices are more suitable. Phone is faster and more portable. Laptop is more powerful for more demanding mobile computing. Desktop is more capable still for media production and gaming. The tablet remains an "also ran" in my lineup. It still gets some use but not enough that I'm gonna shell out another $250-750 on a new tablet anytime soon.
It was great having something that portable, but the something that affected me maybe monthly at the most. Having a decent keyboard and screen is something that will affect you every day. Needless to say I am back using a normal sized laptop these days.
Realized they are just oversized smart phones that can't make cell phone calls, can't be held easily with one hand, but can't be used for creating content like a laptop, or typing emails, and they look silly when used for taking pictures.
Eventually they end up on the nightstand, and used for reading news and looking at pictures in bed at night, before falling asleep or given to kids as babysitting devices.
I'm amazed at the loss we're facing. Something is odd. In the 80s game developers created their own tools from scratch. Now it seems people lost the desire to take advantage of computers. If it's not a desktop then you can't edit a video or compose music, etc, etc ...
No thanks.
I won't ask people to grow internal and external skills as refined as actual musicianship, but with proper understanding of human memory and tactile sense, I'm sure one can find an interaction paradigm that will turn a tablet into another kind of bicycle for the mind.
- For whatever reason, the iPad does not do the thing normal computer screens do when reading papers, which is to make my eyes slide right off them. So while not content creation, it's way nicer than hauling around a stack of journals. I use Papers for this.
- I use either iA Writer or Pages to actually write content, and cut away all the distractions of working on a laptop (like say, Hacker News...). Usually commentaries, discussion sections, introductions - things that need more writing and less clever table formatting. I also use this to write posts for my blog (www.variancehammer.com) which is about Warhammer 40K and my mostly data-driven musings on the game.
- iSSH for SSH access to the cluster, and the sweet, sweet computational power that follows. There's something thrilling about launching cluster jobs from my bedside.
- Keynote for presentations
- PythonMath and Textastic for some musing and prototyping.
- TouchDraw for brainstorming model flow diagrams and the like and having them on-hand later.
I also like Papers on the iPad.
My reading mode for academic papers, using the dedicated app on the iPad, is different than on my laptop (or the laptop tethered to the big monitor). I'm better able to deeply read on the iPad because it's dedicated to that one task.
I probably spend about equal clock-time reading papers on both platforms -- on the laptop I read 2 pages from each of 20 papers, and on the iPad I read 15 pages from each of 4 papers.
But I have to note: I don't create content there, I consume it.
This argument may have been true 3 years ago but they're all vastly easier to carry around in one hand without getting fatigued now. The iPad Air is incredibly light for its size and I was able to use it for hours at a time without wanting to put it down like the older iPads. The retina Mini I have is even lighter.
I agree with everything else you say though. They're great for consuming web content, but I barely use mine for anything else now. If I actually got a phablet like the iPhone 6 Plus, I would probably end up selling my mini altogether because everything I do on my iPad I could do on my iPhone with a larger screen.
I've found that I moved most things to the iPad mini when I first got it. Dropbox + editorial (Python scripting!) + workflow and an updated IFTTT has me rarely reaching for my MacBook pro or heading to the iMac or Mac Pro.
Also Procreate (absolutely awesome app) has me sketching and painting again, now that I don't have to carve out space in my life for an easel and paint gear.
Hmm, this I guess has expanded beyond your comment and into being a bit of a reply to the no content creation mantra in a comment below, but there it is.
But, since getting a Nexus 7 on sale (partly because I wanted to tinker with making mobile apps and wanted to have a tablet sized device to test on) I've found a number of use cases that I didn't realize I had.
The best, most useful, thing is that I use it to work on my Spanish language learning. For the first time in my life, I practice my Spanish every day; for a few minutes before sleep, for a few minutes after waking up, and it replaces my Kindle for restroom visits. I've found my reading comprehension is better than it's ever been, even better than when I spent two years in Spanish class in high school and when I spent more than a month traveling deep in Mexico (where nobody speaks English) after just a short time. Duolingo and Memrise are great tools...so great that in a few more months, when I'm confident in my Spanish, I plan to focus on French. You can use both tools on a laptop, but I don't take my laptop to bed or to the restroom. And, the phone is just a little too small to be effective for this purpose, IMHO.
Likewise, I've found more time for doing online classes...the screen is big enough for videos, but switching between tabs or apps is tedious enough that I don't get distracted the way I do on my laptop or desktop. Again, a use case I discovered after getting the tablet.
I am a bit slow to adopt new stuff like this (but an early adopter of other things; I had a pager for years after everyone else has switched to cell phones, but then got a Sidekick very early in the smart phone story, because there was finally a thing I would want to use a phone for: Browsing the Internet and reading mail), so I dunno what that means for the general case, but I really like my tablet. It gets more use than my phone (because I literally hate phone calls, so my tablet does everything the phone does only better, except fit in my pocket and work without wifi).
"Eventually they end up on the nightstand, and used for reading news and looking at pictures in bed at night, before falling asleep"
Which is a pretty good use case, too. I won't buy a new Kindle when my current one dies (if it ever dies...my first Kindle lasted five+ years before I dropped it on the tile bathroom floor one too many times and cracked the screen), because a tablet works just as well for that use case and has many other uses.
Why not? Why wouldn't you choose the device which best counteracts your tendency to get distracted?
I have actually delegated my Kindle and my Nexus 7 to specific roles. The Kindle is for reading literature, exclusively. The Nexus is for everything else. It even helps me distinguish between leisure time and work/study time (kinda like that rule for addressing insomnia of "don't do anything in bed other than sleep and sex").
Although, if you really want one that bad, get a Nexus 7 tablet with data, and run a VoIP number on it.
The N7 is easier to type on, and the one arcade game I play (emulator called Pinball Arcade) works so much better on the slightly larger device. So now I just play pinball a lot less.
VoIP isn't a real option. For instance, yesterday I had to reactivate one SIM at the airport, and could only do it by making a real phone call on the SIM. Google intentionally disabled this on the N7, and even people that hacked up the ROM couldn't get it working. And many times when I want a phone/SMS, for "emergencies", I don't want to hope my data is working well enough.
> with great batteries
A phablet with a big battery plus not-ultraHD screen would solve the abysmal battery life problems of modern phones... it's likely thinness suffers though?
The problem is that Huawei ships a terrible, messed up version of 4.3. Complete with a button to accidentally force close all programs (and boast about memory "freed"). And a shiny button bar, instead of just black. And bits of Engrish, which would otherwise be endearing, on the custom apps. It sucks. But if I could run Cyanogen on it, it'd be the best phone ever.
There's also the Blu Energy with a 5000mAh battery, but I don't know how good the phone is yet (it's only $150). Blu seems to ship mostly stock Android. The problem is they have many dozens of models (most under $200, a few around the $100 point), so it's hard to figure out what's what. They seem to be targeting Latam with cheap-but-nice devices, like Vivo Air. If they'd focus on a couple of top models, they could easily become the dev phone of choice. Not sure what the unlocking situation is.
I honestly think the issue is that mobile OSes are not useful in a tablet form factor. Microsoft, although not getting the delivery perfect with Windows 8, were at least pushing in the right direction.
Still, the tradeoff is worth it for many people depending on what's more important to them--battery/weight or power/flexibility.
I know I'm in the minority, but I don't mind writing long texts on a touchscreen. For me, the Windows 8 keyboard worked much better than the iPad keyboard though -- I'm not exactly sure why, but the layout and visual style were more suitable for my habits.
I think part of the reason why I like to write fiction on a tablet is that it's a different typing experience from my day job. It switches off the code-typing habit and forces me to write differently.
Phones are personal devices. Tablets are more place-oriented; they'll be in office conference rooms, hotel rooms, and restaurants for whomever needs to use them. They'll be too cheap to steal, and tied to a local WiFi key so they're useless elsewhere.
The main problem is keeping them charged. Phones have individual humans slaved to them to tend to their needs, but place-oriented tablets do not. The wireless charging industry needs to get their act together, unify their three competing standards (Qi, Powermat, and A4WP), and get a charging unit into every business hotel room and airline tray table, then start on conference room tables.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-firs...
Edit: I jumped a year ahead. A better comparison would be to the 233.4 million that are estimated for 2015.
If we assume that there are at least 2 million Linux enthusiasts in the world, 10% of them have heard of Jolla, and 10% of those are willing to spend disposable income on a new kind of Linux device... That gives you a market of 20k people.
So I'm not convinced that Jolla really offers anything compelling to anyone else except a subset of Linux fans.
If you build your expectations based on that exponential bit, and then you hit market saturation/carrying capacity, well, you get exactly the narrative currently surrounding tablets.
Play a couple of games on the couch. Check.
Read an occasional eBook. Check.
Read HN and do my best to avoid typing on the awkward beast. Check.
Hand it to a guest who needs to check webmail. Check.
Not caring about it any more. Check.
Writing web apps instead of native apps because you have all the control. Check.
Not having to deal with the App Store. Check.
Having a real computer on my desk to actually get shit done. Priceless.
For everything else there's MasterCard.
An app store is actually a really good way to curate content. Sure we always hear about the 15% of devs who have issues with it, but for the other 85%, they are doing just fine. It's more good than bad.
Which control? I can't even pick a different non-legacy language without crap-trans-pilation.
I think the big game changing, market capturing products will be smartwatches, VR glasses, electric cars, practical (faster, affordable, standardized) 3D printers and anything else that I've missed out. We're craving to see something completely different and experience them at least once, even if they fail so we're waiting for the right products.
And also as they function as multipurpose devices, the user have so many ways of screwing things up.
There should be a manufacturer of generic tablets that are made to boot right into a single purpose application. There would be countless appliances for such a device!
Our company does exactly this: http://www.zonal.co.uk/news/2013/07/23/zonal-launches-iserve... although with restaurant-owned devices.
I can see a number of downsides - expense, the need to keep it charged, possible crashes....
It also sends the order through to the kitchen immediately, so the waiter is now free to serve other customers rather than going back and forth to the kitchen. A small time saving, but everything adds up if you're busy.
Once an order is in the system, it can be retrieved by any staff or manager from any till or handheld.
It's targeted more at the chain restaurant where the till is the tip of a large reporting and logistics iceberg, rather than mom-and-pop small restaurants.
I don't know about Google's devices but Apple's Configurator allows businesses to manage devices that are shared between multiple users. The iPad can be put into "kiosk mode" in which it boots to a single application. In this mode it's not possible for the user to exit the application or run any other application.
I work on a point-of-sale iPad application for agents in stores and it's working out very well for our customers.
Are they falling out of favor, or do people just not need to buy a new one every year or two?
Tablets are "cool" but I think we're still discovering how we really use them and this is not necessarily in the same way that the advertisement or the salespeople describe.
I'm soon to be looking to upgrading to a slightly larger and faster tablet for the same 2-hour-a-day job.
Stage 1 after the iPad came out was a boom of epic proportions. This was great in some ways because it helped finance the development of new hardware technologies, especially in regards to mobile cpus, batteries, and high resolution screens. But there's a dark side to this boom. It was actually too easy to make a huge profit, which led to laziness and a lack of true innovation. Thinner/lighter/higher-res/faster is great but that's only half, at best, of the end user experience. Tablets more or less languished as little more than what they started out as: glorified content consumption devices.
But tablets and the general "space" around the tablet idea have so much greater potential than the iPad-like experience we've mostly had so far. But because there wasn't much pressure to do more, and money was still raining from the sky, that sort of thing hasn't been much explored. As the tablet market experiences hardship and contraction we'll see that innovation come forward (because it'll be the best way to make the most money in that market) and we'll see a renaissance in tablets over the next couple of years (I hope).
That being said, I think that the case for a tablet over a laptop of similar size/weight is a pretty tough sell, and long-term, convertibles will reign supreme ... and so, my final conclusion from this is that even though I rather dislike the 'tablet' interface baked into Windows 8, once the appropriate hardware exists to support it, I think that Microsoft's concept of a convertible OS is actually a pretty solid one ... although I firmly believe that the UI for 'desktop mode' cannot be the same as the UI for 'tablet mode', even though combining them seems to be Microsoft's ultimate goal. I think that a better goal would be an application framework that allows a single application to shift between modes, without losing state, without restarting. I am looking forward to the day that somebody solves both the hardware and software problems in a single machine.
I could get away with either an American or a French keyboard, but I have none at hand (well, technically there is one, but an accident involving a cup of coffee makes it only useful to write text without the letters 'u', 'i', 'o' and 'p'). So when I need to write French I write it on my iPhone and email it to myself, then copy-paste...
Pretty niche use-case, I admit.
Anyway, we could exchange anecdotal stories all day. A quarter of a billion tablets is still pretty good. They sell 50 million more PCs? It's really only a matter of time. If Apple doesn't evolve the tablet, Microsoft will.
I'd be more interested in a bigger iPad Pro if it could retain the design and lightness of the iPad air.
I suspect that everybody who wants a tablet now has one. So, your new sales are only replacement level.
> Not long ago, we were assured the iPad and its ilk were destined to dominate our everyday lives.
I find it really hard to estimate how much people do use tablets since most tablets (I assume) only have Wi-Fi and are left at home. All we have as a proxy are sales numbers and web statistics. My iPad certainly has its spot in my everyday life.
I have zero interest in a metered, shared data plan. Throttled to 3GB monthly for me is not unmetered.
Steve Jobs strong armed the carriers into offering unlimited data for $30/month. With Steve Jobs out of the way, the carriers see 2GB a month as being equal to unlimited. They just fundamentally do not get it. This is by far one of the largest markets awaiting disruption.
Even smaller networks (TMo with $30/mo for 5GB LTE and unlimited low-speed after, Sprint with unlimited voice/text/data for $50/60/mo) and the various MVNOs with similar plans are considered non-starters to many people because they can lack nationwide coverage.
I'm lucky enough that I spend 99% of my time in metro areas so I can get away with paying $30/mo for data and a handful of minutes that I rarely use anymore. But clearly the "big guys" are leveraging their legacy and reach to charge more for something others can't afford to offer.
I wonder what other sorts of ways there could be to offer nationwide voice and data coverage (or even just data) that enough people could access that it's considered comparable to the services offered by the bastard children of the "Baby Bells".
There's lots of purposes where $1 per gigabyte would be great.
People are wondering why iPad sales have seemingly topped out, while iPhone sales are soaring. Like it's inexplicable magic or beyond the limits of comprehension.
The iPhone delivers greater value at a lower cost. Whoa. Crazy.
The wireless carrier business is nearly a duopoly in the US, and both are essentially legacy businesses whose pricing models are inconsistent with modern Internet usage. Once a viable modern carrier at scale enters the market (think wireless analog of Google Fiber, deployed everywhere), I'm done with AT&T and Verizon forever.
I still believe mobile devices are the future. In the future most people will not have a traditional computer. And by most people, I don't mean wealthy, white and western, I mean most human beings, it is probably a true statement today, it will be even truer tomorrow.