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BlackBerry CEO: Tablet Market Is Dying
Nerval's Lobster writes "BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins believes that tablets will be dead by 2018. 'In five years I don't think there'll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,' he told an interviewer at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles, according to Bloomberg. 'Maybe a big screen in your workplace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.' That may come as a surprise to Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, all of which have built significant tablet businesses over the past few years. Research firm Strategy Analytics suggested in a research note earlier this month that the global tablet market hit 40.6 million units shipped in the first quarter of 2013, a significant rise from the 18.7 million shipped in the same quarter last year. So why would Heins offer such a pessimistic prediction when everyone else — from the research firms to the tablet-makers themselves — seems so full-speed-ahead? It's easy to forget sometimes that BlackBerry has its own tablet in the mix: the PlayBook, which was released to quite a bit of fanfare in early 2011 but failed to earn iPad-caliber sales. Despite that usefulness to developers, however, the PlayBook has become a weak contender in the actual tablet market. If Heins is predicting that market's eventual demise, it could be a coded signal that he intends to pull BlackBerry out of the tablet game, focusing instead on smartphones. It wouldn't be the first radical move the company's made in the past year."
I agree completely. Tablets are a fad. The form factor is terrible and the functionality is lacking. I think that most people are going to continue using phones and laptops.
I don't respond to AC's.
BlackBerry seems incapable of judging where there market is going. That's why they were blindsided when the iPhone came out. They still had a chance to adapt, but they pretty much pretended like the iPhone didn't exist. Even after Android came out they had their heads in the sand. By the time they finally woke up, it was too late.
From the company bleeding money for the last three years because it has absolutely no idea what customers want, comes the grand declaration "Customers won't want tablets."
Maybe if Blackberry had released a tablet that had full access to the Android market, they might have sold some. My daughter got a playbook from her boyfriend's parents a few months ago, and while the hardware is nothing to sneeze at, the fact that you couldn't even install the Netflix app was a revelation to me as to just how clueless RIM/Blackberry really is.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Screen Real Estate.
There is some stuff you Just. Cant Do. On a phone. The screen is too small.
IF his idea that phones will be a little bigger, do we really want to look like an idiot walking around with a giant brick to our head? Or have to wory about always using a bluetooth earpiece? And where will you stick that larger than you prefer phone?
IMHO an iPhone 5 is starting to get a little too big. The larger samsungs are even worse.
In my experience, the only people who make those sort of statements were either paid a metric fuckton to do such a project by a tablet maker so they can get some news ... and people that are so bad at 'creating content' that the tablet being a shitty way to do it is going to have no measurable effect on their output.
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Of course the tablet market isn't dying. It could possibly be described as a bubble at the moment, but that doesn't mean that that sales are going to disappear within the next five years.
The issue is more that tablets are essentially as powerful as they'll need to be for the next five years, if not longer. They're designed to be highly portable devices that can access the internet and be used as ebook readers, but are large enough to be easier to read from than a smartphone. Aside from the people who need to have the new shiny, most people who own or are thinking of buying a tablet will only upgrade when it can no longer handle their needs, much like Windows XP computers.
I think tablets are fine for the niche they fill. They make great little consumption devices that are somewhat inexpensive, and handle web content just fine. I have a few sitting around at home that we can just pick up and check email with, or my kid can go watch netflix on the bed, or whatever. They certainly aren't going to be replaces computers for anyone but the most casual of consumers, but they do fill a technology gap very nicely.
One thing that he hints at, which I agree with, is that tablets aren't going to change too much in the next five years. Overall sales will level off once everyone has one, and I do suspect the wifi-only versions will be the primary sellers after that. Prices will probably settle in the 100-200 dollar range, at most, with plenty of $50 options. They'll basically take the same route that MP3 players took 10 years ago.
I disagree, unless you're plugging a keyboard into it, they are piss poor as a means of creating content. At which point, you have a device that's barely any smaller than a laptop and quite a bit slower.
I think he's right. Have you noticed that phones are getting bigger and tablets are getting smaller? I think phones are about to eat tablets in the same way they ate other stand along devices. People don't want two devices. They want one.
Personally, I hate the idea.
The difference between netbooks/chromebooks & a tablet? One has a keyboard attached... one uses a bluetooth keyboard.
That and 10" netbooks tended to be cheaper than a 10" tablet, a Bluetooth keyboard, and a case to keep them together. And netbooks shipped with an operating system that supports tiled or overlapping windows, unlike tablets whose operating systems inherit the all maximized all the time window management policy from the smartphones that they were originally designed for. And when you do need a more precise pointing device, there's more of a culture of using an external mouse with a netbook than with a tablet.
And netbooks got their asses handed to them by the iPad. Why do you think that is? Is it because everyone is stupid and will come to their senses (i.e., somehow come to agree with you instead of having their own preferences)? Or is it because the things that you decry are things that they either don't mind, or specifically prefer?
Honestly, nine times out of ten, if a nerd makes nothing but technical claims against some product, it's almost always guaranteed to be a success. That's because the things we care about are outside of the norm.
A lot of geeks seemed to think that because computers went from nerd to commonplace over the past two decades, that means people all became geeks themselves. They didn't. Most people don't actually want computers (or tablets or phones, etc.) for the same reasons we do. Yes, there's some overlap, but the things that stand out to us do not stand out to them.
People like you often complain that the iPad is a "consumption device". Well, guess what? Most people want to consume on their devices. That's why they have them. Consume and communicate, and engage in "lite" forms of productions (i.e., share photos with Instagram filters). They don't want a mouse. They don't want Blender 3D. They don't want gcc and vim.
It's hilarious to watch geeks extoll the virtues of the netbook over the tablet as an argument that the iPad is a fad, but the netbook is the real product people want. Every quarter, tens of millions of people prove that assertion ass-backwards. I always thought geeks were supposed to be smart, so why do so many of them have such a hard time noticing this contradiction? A contradiction that is easily remedied by a simple adjustment of a few basic assumptions?
Precisely. This is the distinction that so many of the "tablets suck for content creation" crowd are missing.
If you're going to be coding, work with a device that has an interface designed around a keyboard. If you're going to be writing articles, do the same.
If you're going to be painting digitally, find yourself something that works with a stylus. Previously, people used to attach a Wacom peripheral to their PCs to accomplish this task, but tablets are already owned by millions of people and can basically do this sort of thing right out of the box.
For musicians, especially amateurs, the tablet can be a complete game-changer, since it can replace the need to purchase hundreds or thousands of dollars in instruments and other tools. Clearly it won't be replacing the need for a physical violin or a physical piano anytime soon, but for stuff like synths, beat boxes, or just quick compositions that could use an instrument the musician doesn't have available, a tablet can fill that gap quite capably for a fraction of the price of purchasing those items individually, and its touchscreen interface is far better-suited for those uses than a mouse and keyboard are.
If you're going to be taking or editing videos or pictures, a tablet won't be replacing a professional-grade setup, but for amateurs the tools that are available are already quite good, and a lot of the actions (e.g. for videos: scrubbing through a video, selecting a portion of the video, or establishing the path of a panning shot; for images: cropping, zooming, or rotating) come more naturally with fingers on a touchscreen than they do with a mouse and keyboard hooked up to a screen that sits in front of you.
Tablets don't suck for content creation. In fact, they're quite good at it. But they're general purpose tools that will rarely be better than purpose-built systems, especially once you start to talk about professionals and the incredibly specific needs that they have.