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With the advent of larger smartphones, I use my tablet less and less. I know they're not great now, but perhaps foldables will kill tablets all together? It m
by osrec 7y ago
With the advent of larger smartphones, I use my tablet less and less.
I know they're not great now, but perhaps foldables will kill tablets all together?
It may actually be a smart move to unbloat the product lines a little.
- simonh 7y agoiPad sales aren’t going anywhere. Apple sells twice as many tablets as they do laptops.
- ulfw 7y agoMy iPad Pro is my favourite portable device that I wouldn't want to give up. Definitely not a feeling I have about my Macbook nor my iPhone.
- ezequiel-garzon 7y agoWhy would you say you don’t have that feeling about your iPhone?
- ulfw 7y agoForm factor I suppose. I just don't use my phone for as many things as my iPad (which I have always with me, with LTE). iPhone I use for short messages, google maps and quick email read-throughs and taking photos. That's about it. Maybe streaming songs. Any Android phone can do the same, some even better (Huawei Mate 30 Pro cameras e.g.) iPad can do all the above, plus much better web browsing, reddit, video/youtube viewing, photo editing, email and writing in general (with Apple Smartkeyboard), etc. It works with touch, pencil and keyboard and just feels like my personal device.
- lostmsu 7y agoIf you carry iPad around, why keep iPhone? Why not something like Galaxy Note? Or one of 7 inch phones if pencil is optional?
- scarface74 7y agoOn my 9.7 inch iPad I can have split screen, video playing in a small window and a slide over view. When iOS 13 comes out it will have better keyboard support and finally mouse support. If anything I want the larger iPad Air. As far as the Galaxy Note. Android still sucks as a tablet OS.
- pmontra 7y agoI bought a Tab S5e recently. Samsung did a good job with its DEX interface. When activated it's a desktop with a dock and Android apps in windows. Bluetooth mouse and keyboard or soft keyboard. Video out over USB-C to hook it to a monitor with a HDMI adapter. And USB host mode obviously. There is even an Ubuntu 16.04 container sharing Android's kernel. It must be installed separately. It displays its own Unity desktop in a full screen DEX window and it comes with LibreOffice, VSCode, IntelliJ IDEA among the others. Great as ssh client, better than any other I used on Android. I used it to edit some pictures with Gimp and I made it run Rails, to check it could be used for some sw development.
- ulfw 7y agoUnwieldy as a phone, too small for really good web browsing. What would convince me away would have been something like the Huawei Mate X foldable, before the US had to go all ...
- simonh 7y agoI feel the same way, because the iPad is dramatically more useful. I’m a gamer so I have a ton of PDFs on it, read comics on it, program on it in Pythonista, write in Google Docs, create charts maps and diagrams, all sort I couldn’t realistically do on a phone. One of my daughters loves drawing and ‘painting’ on the iPad, I got Procreate for her and she spends hours on it. She complains she’s started tapping to undo when she’s sketching on paper.
- reaperducer 7y agoMy iPad Pro is my favourite portable device that I wouldn't want to give up. Definitely not a feeling I have about my Macbook nor my iPhone. I felt the same way about my MacBook Air. It's been my constant companion since 2011 to a dozen countries and dozens more cities. Love that machine. This past April my wife bought me an iPad. The last three trips I took were with the 'Pad instead of the Air. I'm really surprised how useful that little thing is. I feel like I can go back to a feature phone now.
- jay_kyburz 7y agoI did exactly that. My daily carry is the new Nokia 3310. It was $90. It's fine. I can lose it or drop it and not care. And it's small! Learning how to type a text again using the numpad was painful, but after a few weeks I was back up to speed. No Facebook, Slack, Email. Not even a browser. No distractions. When I'm out with my kids, I'm with my kids. When I'm working, I'm at my desk with a real computer.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoWhy not a Nokia with full QWERTY layout then already?
- jay_kyburz 7y agoYou can't buy them.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoHow come? If you are an american: https://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Unlocked-QWERTY-Dedicated-MicroSD/dp/B003V4AJSU/ https://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Unlocked-QWERTY-Dedicated-Micro... They are being sold a lot on ebay etc. too. Refurbished and cheap, if you are willing to wait for the package. I use C3-00 and non of it's (primitive) smart features. It's still a dumb phone.
- srndh 7y agoI am doing something close. My main phone is iphone SE. The only apps in that is my podcast & my personal email account. My rest social media including whatsapp in another device.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoBecause iPads are the new SmartBoards. Basically every upscale school district runs a fleet of them. That's ton of iPads. Edit: And I say this as someone who's developed software for the education space in a way that necessitates knowing what tech stack schools have.
- nexuist 7y agoiPads in schools definitely contribute a lot to total sales revenue, but I don't think they're the majority users by any stretch of the imagination. Plenty of school districts also bought into the GSuite + Chromebook fantasy so they can't be the only reason iPad is doing so well.
- CydeWeys 7y agoIn what way is G Suite + Chromebook a fantasy? Seems pretty useful for writing papers.
- nexuist 7y agoSorry, I probably used the wrong word there. I was referring to the fantasy tech companies try to sell school districts that buying X technology will radically alter education forever; as long as you spend your money with them. I used Chromebooks in high school and they were quite nice, but they didn't completely evolve my relationship with education. They were tools and not much more than that. Certainly not part of an education revolution. Definitely useful for writing papers though. I imagine districts that bought iPads are content with them as well.
- joenot443 7y agoAnecdotally, I've seen that GSuite + Chromebook has worked wonders for my high-schooler sisters. Assignment hand-ins can be done all online, no problems with file compatibility, and homework can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- shams93 7y agoThe iPad gives you a lot of functionality for audio and video production, nobody has produced any mobile apis on par with apples core audio for audio production. Support for creative media on Android is so limited compared to what you can do with iOS whether it's an iPad or iPhone. Google underestimates the importance of media production and focuses on very basic use cases.
- nstart 7y agoExtend this comment to the most creative branches. When it comes to being digitally creative you need an OS and hardware functioning together without any hiccups. I've worked on iPads and other tablets and from drawing to music making, nothing has come close to the feel of it. Microsoft's surface pros are the closest in hardware and work decently for art, but honestly, when software like sketchbook is present on the iPad, there's no competition.
- pjmlp 7y agoWindows Phone did, but we all know how it went. The multimedia (audio, graphics, 3D) story on Android is really bad. Half backed APIs, no Android Studio tooling, command line tools and github project dumps without proper documentation.
- emilfihlman 7y agoWhere can I get a top of the line 5,5-5,8" or less phone? Bigger phones are becoming very unwieldy and are definitely not better.
- wmf 7y agoThe Sony Compact series and the Samsung S10e are the last "small" phones.
- pmontra 7y agoI'm writing this on an Xperia X Compact (first gen, 2016). The next iterations more or less kept the same form factor but started to weight more and more. I'm not liking that. I would own a SE if I'd like iOS. For a 3.3" smartphone check this https://liliputing.com/2019/06/palms-tiny-smartphone-now-available-carrier-unlocked-for-350.html https://liliputing.com/2019/06/palms-tiny-smartphone-now-ava...
- vetinari 7y agoJust because the display diagonal is rising does not mean, that the phones themselves are getting bigger. It is due to two factors: a) the phone displays are getting wider; with widening of the aspect ratio, the diagonal is rising faster than the surface of the display. b) the ratio of screen to body rises (you are getting smaller bezels). That means in practice, that for example the 5,2" Sony Xperia Z5 (with ~70% screen to body ratio, 16:9 display aspect ratio) is 1,5 mm narrower and 4 mm shorter than 6,1" Samsung Galaxy S10 (~88% screen to body ratio, 19:9 aspect ratio). Subjectively, thanks to the rounded corners of the S10, it feels smaller than Z5. Based on the screen diagonal, you would not say that you are going to have such impression, the difference is 0,9" after all.
- nutjob2 7y agoPhones seemed to have settled on around 75 x 160 x 9mm, there is surprisingly little variation from that. Somewhere along the line they seemed to have decided that is as big as people will generally accept. As you say the battle now is on to eliminate bezels. From what I can tell the final station on that journey is a screen of about 6.5" to 6.75".
- rodgerd 7y agoThe iPad, iPad Pro, and various Surface options (Pro & Go) very popular and successful. This is Google failing, not the lack of a market.
- rightos 7y agoIsn't iPad market is shrinking or staying the same? Not growing by much certainly. And the Surface line pretty much succeeds primarily on the more laptop style models as far as I've seen at least.
- sytelus 7y agoNot at all. Although not fast growing, tablets are still great business. Not all people like to carry those monstrous phones in their pockets. Even if you do, its hard to enjoy details while streaming high def content, planning trip, reading books with pictures/diagrams, do email jujitsu, play high def games and so on. Tablets are far more popular among kids age < 10. I see the transition where laptops would be largely extinct and tablets with keyboard dock would be a norm. It has already happened but not yet full scale. The future user base would be divided between two groups where power users would own tablets + phone while more typical users would own only phone. Giving up on tablets entirely is unwise. Power users are minority but they have lions share of influence.
- rightos 7y agoA tablet and dock is clumsy and a poor experience compared to a laptop in both hardware and software. I would never consider replacing a desktop OS with iOS or Android in their current states, I think Samsung did some work to improve multi-window support so perhaps that's worth a look, but I don't want a sloppy keyboard that folds randomly when I'm trying to type or I can't position comfortably on my lap on a car, bus or while sitting outside. After owning a few older iPads and Nexus tablets, I haven't used them in years, instead preferring to do content consumption on my phone or TV and anything more on a full PC. Most people say they even prefer to do basic shit like shopping on PCs - easier to comparison shop, bigger screens, more capable machines and user interfaces. This situation isn't going to improve for tablets, they're trying to hit on a niche that's quite limited.
- hyperpallium 7y agoTheory: foldables will not lead to phones that unfold to tablets, but half-phones that unfold to phones, because people want one-handed convenience.
- jhanschoo 7y agoTablets still have big niches. Education, touchscreen computers, etc.