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This is an article I wrote for my website, and I thought I'd share it with you.
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As much as I dislike Apple and their products, one still has to concede that they know their business well. But Apple's recent premier of the iPad- their attempt at the ill-fated tablet form factor- is, so far as I can see, their biggest blunder to date.
Whilst I'd love to talk specifically about the iPad, I feel it's only appropriate to talk first in general about the whole idea of a tablet. Not least because it'll help to explain the inevitably poor reviews I'll have so much pleasure in writing for it later on.
Now I'm not a luddite by any stretch of imagination, but I, for as long as I can remember, have always been extremely sceptical of tablet computers. They are essentially somewhere between the rapidly popularising smartphone, and the massive, stonking success that is the netbook. There is of course nothing wrong with taking the middle ground and filling a gap in the market with a new device; for example, the netbook is, for all intensive purposes some sort of cross between a laptop and a smartphone. However the success of the netbook has come about because it takes the best bits from both of these devices and brings them together to create one extremely useful piece of kit. The tablet on the other hand, has managed to pick all the bad bits from its parent devices, creating a form factor that the majority of people have absolutely no use for.
Let's refer back to the netbook for a moment to illustrate my point. The laptop, by definition, is much more mobile and portable than a desktop computer; and the smartphone considerably more so than that. Not only that, but a full charge on my phone will last a lot longer than the 2-3 the average laptop can mange. However there's a lot of stuff you can't do with a smartphone that a laptop makes feel like a full blown desktop. I guess the most obvious differences are screen size and storage capacity, but also equally extending to processing power, operating system, etc. You get the jist. The netbook occupies a happy compromise between the two. A netbook is much lighter and more portable than most laptops, they have a much longer battery life and they're generally a lot cheaper. But they're also much more powerful and can store more data than a smartphone.
But now returning to the subject of this article. The tablet is trying to fill a gap that simply doesn't exist- the netbook and smartphone are actually a lot more closely related than first appearances would have you know. The tablet is supposed to be more portable than a netbook, and granted they probably are, but only marginally so. The iPad for example sports a 9.7 inch screen, and a fair old bit of frame around the outside of it. My netbook has a 10 inch screen, and by the looks of it is no bigger than the Apple tablet- if anything, it's smaller. Of course the iPad is a lot thinner, owing to its lack of hard drive (and moving parts in general), but that really is where the benefits end.
No hard drive means a lot less storage capacity, topping out at a 64Gb SSD (solid state drive), and I don't know about you, but Apple marketing the iPad as good for looking at photos and watching films seems a bit ironic. And this is the same for all tablets, so don't go thinking it's just Apple that's made a bummer. So if it's not really good for media, what else could you use it for? Probably not work either, actually. Tablets of course have no keyboards, and sure, they have on-screen mock-ups, but that's half you screen gone then. As far as I'm concerned, being able to see only a single paragraph on the screen at time is pretty poor. So that makes it only good for short emails and menial tasks such as organising a calendar and taking short notes; I thought that's what a smartphone's for. Only a smartphone let's you make phone calls, has a longer battery life and fits in your pocket.
I think I've covered all the bases here. And you know what, a tablet probably is useful to a very select few people, who want it for a very specific need. But a tablet really isn't a consumer item, no matter how pretty it looks. So if you think you need a tablet, think again, and then again, and then again, because you probably don't.
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My blog
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