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The Great Tablet Gold Rush Is Over (mashable.com)
Earlier this month, Dell announced that it will no longer sell Android tablets. The company added that slate tablet market is "over-saturated" and is "experiencing declining demand from consumers." The company says it will focus more on 2-in-1 -- otherwise known as hybrid laptops -- devices moving forward. Dell is right. According to IDC, tablet sales have fallen greatly in the last few years. Mashable goes on to say that the "great tablet gold rush is over." From an article: Pretty much every major tablet maker's growth fell year-over-year. Apple's iPad and Samsung's Galaxy Tabs, the two most popular brands of tablets, were down 18.8% and 28.1%, respectively. [...] In the beginning, the pitch was: The tablet is the future of computing. It'll replace your phone and your laptop. Then it became: A small tablet will replace your smartphone. Today, the pitch: It's good enough to replace your laptop. But only for some people, and only if you're willing to get by with a mobile OS. Long story short: Tablets are a complete mess right now. We can't seem to decide if we want them to replace all of our devices or only a few of them.
Hell is a place of eternal torment, in which there is no hope of peace or salvation...
...or of good free Wi-Fi or more than a bar of mobile phone signal, so your tablets/laptops/smartphones won't be very good there anyway. Oh, and they don't have any wired Ethernet, either.
Most people see a tablet and know what they want to do with it, or are surprised when it's better than expected. Only tech reviewers and vendor marketing departments were planning on tablets replacing all those things listed. I bought mine because I wanted a tablet, not a phone replacement or a laptop replacement or an interactive dinner plate/hack du jour. I assume most of it is due to a need to generate sales and page views and all that, but mostly I found it was all fairly silly. I like my tablet because it's a tablet, stop trying to tell me why I _should_ like it.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Some tablets did have (very nice) keyboards. Some people would also love to replace their now antique tablets from 2011... But we can't because no one makes those anymore. The rush towards the bottom happened and 'high end' tablets became dinosaurs. Btw I never considered the android OS on my old tablet 'crippled', it did everything I could want form a tablet and even everything I needed for a laptop. I know not all tablets were like that, but it's been my experience.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I commented on it elsewhere, but my tablet is a Asus Transformer Prime TF-201 from 2011 and it had a detachable keyboard with a hinged 'flip' to it. By default it had a micro-SD card slot, headphone jack, micro-HDMI, and an 8 hour battery among other things. The keyboard held a second battery with nearly the same charge as the main one, full-size USB and SD card slot, and the keyboard itself wasn't cramped (and so you could type at full speed). Heck do to USB I could even connect mice or a desktop keyboard and use them, and I've read/played things from/formatted USB drives with it. I've done everything from video editing to writing on it, so it could do anything I'd possibly want to do on a laptop. Sadly the gorilla glass screen and durable aluminum body construction haven't saved it from eventually getting cracks and dents, though these haven't made it stop working... yet. However it running Android 4.1.1 is both a blessing and a curse. It was still 'designed with tablets in mind', but it is outdated and the software doesn't exactly play well with it anymore.
I have zero Apple products, so an Ipad is not tempting at all for me. Even if it was the wireless keyboards always seem to have more issues than I'd like to hear about and most don't seem all that good. Windows 'tablets' that I've looked at feel slow and clumsy and I just can't end up liking 'windows lite' apps. I dislike them even on Windows on desktops or laptops.
I hadn't even heard of the Pixel C. Looking at it though it lacks USB and does the same silly 'no cords man!' thing that the Ipad and most MS tablets do. Even so it looks closer than most to what I'd want.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise