Funnily enough, tablets were disrupted by phones, even considering the former are older.
What happened to tablet sales?
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#72The only tablet I've ever wanted to own is a light 12-13" e-ink reader for music sheets. Sony did one as an experiment and closed the division I think?
http://www.gvido.tokyo/
Its a dual screen e ink reader.
From their FAQ:
We are to make an announcement of the product On April 2017. There, You will find a lot more of GVIDO and related products & services. We are making great effort to be ready in mid 2017
About pricing The final price hasn’t yet set. Since it has 2 large scale E-INK monitors, the price of the first model is expected to be slightly higher than two of iPad Pro 12.9 inches. It’s getting slightly higher because of the new components though, We try hard to keep it as low as possible.
Format will be PDF and it has a SD reader.
Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#73Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that assessment wasn't entirely wrong, it's just that smartphones , rather than tablets, turned out to be that general-purpose PC for many people.
Smartphones got much larger. I think if it were just Apple, we'd still have tiny screens on our phones and iPads for general purpose computing at home. Thankfully there is competition and people voted for larger phones with their wallets, so now our phones are as large as we "need" them to be.
I'm sure that played a role. Personally I hate big phones, which is why I have the smallest iPhone (thankfully they keep that option, at least) and an iPad Mini. But many people around me are perfectly happy to use a big ass-phone for most of what they do. Good for them :-).
Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#75The problem with tablets is they're incredibly limited. The hardware seems to improve with every generation, but specifically in the instance of iOS: the software seems to be stagnate. What's the point in having super fast storage, quad core processors and fast memory if the software is so limiting and horrible it doesn't let you take advantage of it? As a developer, I find iOS to be a horrible operating system and v…
The same thing applies for Android tablets, however I find Android tablets to be slightly more developer friendly But Android tablets are also awful. Although I am primarily an Apple user and my wife uses an iPad, we bought an higher-end ASUS tablet based on Atom for me and our daughter (to watch cartoons on long car trips). The tablet came bloated with all kinds of nonsense apps, of which more than half cannot be re…
My experience with Android tablets has also been dismal. I've had two: a first (maybe second?) gen Kindle Fire rooted Cyanogenmod and more recently a Pixel C purchased with the dev discount.
The first was kinda slow and heavy, and its display was too low DPI to use it for extended reading. All that was somewhat forgivable given that it wasn't supposed to run anything but Amazon's flavor of android, and, well, it's old. Running phone apps on it wasn't too bad since it's a 7" tablet.
The Pixel though... its hardware was nice. It looked nice, felt nice, and for the most part, handled nicely (though its bezels had be accidentally tapping things on the screen frequently). The problem is that its WiFi drivers were horrible and as it turns out, the cracks in the android experience are much more visible when running on modern, powerful hardware. Lots of bits just felt janky, disjointed, or sluggish. None of the browsers I tried were as nice as mobile Safari, though Firefox came closest, which is weird to me — why isn't Google's browser the best on Google's OS and Google's hardware?
Beyond that, the C's full size form factor made the lack of quality tablet apps on Android blindingly apparent. More often than not I had to settle for stretched out phone apps, which look and feel like crap on such a large screen. To be fair, the tiny handful of good tablet apps I found were very well-made, but they were far too rare.
I'd also say Android's dev/hacker-friendliness is arguable. Yes, one can side load unsigned apps, which is cool. To me, though, this point is nearly moot due to the quality disparity between the Android SDK and dev ecosystem vs the same of iOS. Perhaps I'm biased, but barring projects where iOS doesn't provide the necessary hardware access or something, I'd almost always do my prototypes and v1s on iOS and port to Android later when demand drums up than vice versa, simply due to time and frustration saved.
Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#76The problem as i see it is twofold.
a) Google got into a platform civil war. Just as Android was getting serious about tablets, ChromeOS happened.
b) Intel tried to ram ATOM down everyone's throat.
Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#77Tablet sales are lagging in America because manufacturers are not innovating. One of the top rated Android tablets today is the Nvidia Shield K1. It's a great tablet. It costs $200. You can use it to stream a very playable PC gaming experience via GeForce Now provided you have a solid 20 mbps connection. You can connect it to your television and use it as a console. It's 3 years old and still pretty rock-and-roll wei…
The nvidia tablet is still king of the tablet hill, despite its age. When the new one is released, I'm buying two.
The reason it is king is because Nvidia has basically pulled an Apple. Same internals have been supported from 5.0 all the way to 7.0. This while most tablets barely have been supported within a single own major version.
Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#78I rarely see tablets in the wild anymore. Has anyone else had the same experience? Even at the office I no longer see execs walking around with them. Just a few years ago these things were everywhere out in public. I assume the remaining holdouts have relegated them to bedtime devices.
That's because tablets are a stupid toy fad.
They combine the worst features of a laptop and a smartphone (too big to fit in your pocket, too awkward to type compared to a normal keyboard) and offer very dubious advantages, not to mention probably the worst software support out of all portable devices (barring smartwatches, another dumb fad).
Sure, a lot of normies and apple fanboys bought into the fad originally, but now they're beginning to realize that the device is mostly useless except for some casual youtubing in bed or letting your kid play some educational games.
Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#79Tablets are less convenient than phones or laptops for all tasks. "Hybrid classes never work in practice, you have to minmax". People hoped that tablets would be a useful addition to their lives, and now that they know that they're wrong, they have stopped buying them.
Re: What happened to tablet sales?
#80The problem with tablets is they're incredibly limited. The hardware seems to improve with every generation, but specifically in the instance of iOS: the software seems to be stagnate. What's the point in having super fast storage, quad core processors and fast memory if the software is so limiting and horrible it doesn't let you take advantage of it? As a developer, I find iOS to be a horrible operating system and v…
You sound like the person who would really like a Pro Surface. I am a Linux head but the build is quality and the ease of tablet like duty is amazing. I used my friends with a frown and then I became really envious of the form factor and quality. I think this is the future of non-Apple laptops.
Minor thing but I think perhaps you meant Surface Pro? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-pro-...