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.

Comments

Saturation

[Ann Coulter]

It is probably market saturation. It happened with music players a decade ago and happens to almost every other invention.

Re:Saturation

[jandrese]

Yep, manufacturers overestimated the market capacity for Tablets. In the end they're a fairly niche product, and everybody who wanted one pretty much has one at this point. They aren't useless, but they aren't compelling for most people either. You get a device that's the size of a small laptop, but less capable because it's crippled with a phone OS and no keyboard. I use mine somewhat regularly, but only for a handful of tasks:
1. Reading full color comics. The Kindle sucks for this.
2. Watching video on the go. Much better experience than the phone, but this is only for long car rides and is used to keep the kids entertained.
3. Playing games. My phone is an iPhone, so all of my Android gaming has to be done on the tablet. This is a very niche use, and it really only came about from me looking for a reason to even turn the thing on in the first place. Were it not for the Humble Bundle I don't think this would even make the list.

Web browsing and email are also possible, but the experience is decidedly worse than a laptop so I don't usually do it. Especially if I have to reply to an email.

The big advantages with phones is portability. They're always in the pocket ready to go. Tablets don't have that, yet they're stuck with the same drawbacks that phones have like touch controls and a locked down OS.

Re:Saturation

[frovingslosh]

Lets tell the whole truth. Not just "Dell announced that it will no longer sell Android tablets", but that lots and lots of Android tablets were sold and now Dell will no longer provide updates, including security updates, to their customers for the tablets that they did sell. Now they want to sell something else. They hope to sell lots of them. Can anyone figure out what is going to happen when that market is "saturated"?

Re:Saturation

[jafiwam]

I am eagerly awaiting the end of the stupid trend for websites to all look the same with the same gigantic blocky format in an attempt to "capture" the tablet market.

Every tablet can zoom, there's no need to dumb down the entire internet for them.

Re:Saturation

[Chryana]

You would have a point if Dell was an exception. Unfortunately, it seems software support ends for a lot of Android device on the moment that they leave the factory. I just checked the Staples site, and most of the tablets they offer are still running Lollipop. Now, even Google has stopped making tablets, so good luck finding an Android tablet whose manufacturer is willing to keep providing updates on it. Thus, I don't see how Dell is better or worse than the rest of the manufacturers out there.

Bad input

[Moof123]

The touch interface sucks for a lot of things, making it a lame replacement for many things. Browsing the web is good. Games are are largely bad. Many really need a game pad or mouse style input to be decent. So while an ipad can easily run doom or quake level stuff with ease, mostly the bad control interface ruins them.

Typing sucks on a touch interface, too slow for anything beyond a few sentences at a time.

So our ipads mostly get used to watch Netflix while cooking dinner, playing music, checking news, and not much more. Much of the promise is ruined by a lack of mouse and keyboard.

Re:First they came for my desktop ...

[Yvan256]

First they came for our desktops, and we stood our ground.

Signed,
Pro users and gamers.

The Pitch is the Problem

[Thyamine]

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.

Re:I saw this when the rush started

[Junta]

Also, Point of Sale equipment. Tablets ate a big chunk out of that market.

I'll say that the PC industry is faring better in new sales that Tablets by a *wide* margin, showing that PC market continues to be driven by upgrades, while the tablet market is generally not seeking better, faster, stronger.