Is Tablet Success Bound To Their Crackability?

Hitting the front page for the first time, rippeltippel writes "The Economist recently published an article about HP quitting the tablet market. Nothing new I said, until I read 'the announcement showed that the firm had finally seen the light about the tablet market — namely, that there is no such thing.' But are the games closed with the iPad as a clear winner? Possibly not: 'hackers have embraced the Nook, "rooting" its underlying Linux software ... so it can run many more applications from Google's online app store and elsewhere.' A review on Amazon's Kindle tablet page reads: 'They've cracked it — this is the future.' Can it possibly be read as 'Crackable tablets are the future of tablets?'" Smartphone vendors seem to have gotten the message: users want to control the software on their phones. It is a shame that Palm/HP, who were one of the only vendors open from the start, more or less lost the game. Unfortunately it seems that tablet and ebook reader vendors have yet to get the message.

Comments

Tablets aren't for "working" on

[Overzeetop]

That's not to say you can't so work with them. In fact, I do. But tablets are about consumption right now, and Apple's taught that dog to hunt. Tech folks need to step out of Mom's basement and realize that the rest of us just want to be able to do shit, and if we've got $500 to drop on a toy like the iPad, we sure as hell have $40 a month to pay for content through the iTMS.

If you buy a $150-$200 tablet so that you can rip/download content and serve it up in its native format, it means working on that house of cards to get everything operating. I know, I set up a media center PC and a usenet scraper, and have MyMedia to catalog my movies after I rip them. It's all quite snazzy, but God damned it takes too much time to keep running and if anything goes wrong my wife looks at me like she's never seen a PC or a remote control and expects me to fix it.

Tablets are about quick access to things you want to do. It's all the things you want a smartphone to do, but in the right form factor and without having to worry about making or receiving phone calls (and in return you can't put a tablet in your pocket).

Those of us who go back far enough to remember programming in BASIC to generate stats for D&D characters should be the ones to realize that these are not computers as we know them, but entertainment devices. Once you get past that hurdle, the usefulness of tablets makes a lot more sense.