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5 Reasons Tablets Suck, and You Won't Buy One

Crazzaper writes "When the iPad was announced, a lot of people who didn't care about tablets came out to bash Apple's new device. These same people said 'I would have bought it if it had a full OS,' but in reality full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started. This article gives an interesting perspective on why this happened, and argues that there's five big reasons why more powerful tablets exists but no one cares."

2 of 553 comments (clear)

  1. well duh by peragrin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Windows is not and never has been a tablet OS. a Tablet isn't a desktop, you can't use the two in the same fashion. the pointers are different(fingers/stylus, vs a mouse pointer) You can't just graph touch inputs into a desktop GUI, and expect everything to work right. MSFT has made one decent touch based app, That is why tablets have thus failed. Everyone tries to treat them as notebooks with touch screens, not as tablets with their own gui designs.

    Apple with their sometimes annoying closed systems, are breaking MSFT out of their bad habits. It took 3-4 years but MSFT fianlly realized that putting a desktop Interface on their phones was a bad idea that limited usability. With the Ipad maybe in 5 years MSFT will make a real windows tablet OS, that ditches a wide bar that eats up valuable real estate and come up with a new way to work with tablets. I would say linux might get their first, but Linux devs while innovative seem to have no luck in advertising to manufacturers.

    typing this on my mac, with my Iphone nearby i will say i won't get an ipad, my purpose of a small tablet will be primarily for browsing and unfortunately that will require flash. though someone finally taking a stand against flash is refreshing.

    --
    i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
  2. Re:Author ignores the main reason tablets failed by ahankinson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You won't get an argument from me - a laptop will definitely do "more."

    The iPad isn't built to do more. In fact, it's almost explicitly designed to do less. I predict it will be a big hit for the people that don't need to do more, but rather do the same thing every day with their computer: read their e-mail, check a few webpages, maybe look at some pictures or watch a movie. About the only thing I can think of that the iPad would do better than a laptop is for reading books.

    Truth is, most people don't need their computers to do more. They just want it to do the things they understand, which is often a very limited subset of tasks.