Having Patience With Tablets

We look to movies or science fiction novels to foster our dreams of what technology may some day offer. Be it James Bond or Star Wars, we let our imaginations go to where devices may someday equip us with tools our ancestors would never even have fathomed, performing every entertainment and workspace computing task our minds can conceive.

We are now seeing incredible breakthroughs daily, and tablets have effectively become an icon for bleeding edge tech. Many newly released tablets have essentially been a disappointment. We expect with each new release that this one will "have it all." Cell phone carriers and device manufacturers have moved to leverage this and continually update the tools we use, making perfectly good hardware obsolete in order to tempt our insatiable thirst for the shiny new breakthrough. So when we look to the tablet, we continually are disappointed.

One thing we do know is tablets aren't going away as a form factor. By 2015 The Gartner Group predicts that the market will grow in sales of units by 23 percent with the total number of units in consumer hands reaching nearly 300 million! We will continue to see a variety of different operating systems powering these tablets.

This is why I call for patience when it comes to tablet development; we are just beginning to understand how these technologies can be used and formulate new questions that arise as they advance. For a while, there was a push for users to prove the iPad could replace laptops. It did not take long for this idea to diminish. Just look at the arrival of external keyboards and docking stations flooding the accessory market. A friend reminded me recently of when early Jornada and Palm handheld users were trying to use fold out keyboards to type documents in the late '90s. Now when we do the same thing with tablets we look pretty silly. I have not used my Apple keyboard and dock station since I bought them with my iPad a year ago. Together, tablets with all their accessories, end up weighing more than the laptop they were trying to replace.

I get to have the first look at devices like the BlackBerry Playbook, New HP Palm WebOS products, Meego tablets, and iDevices. Right now the tablet is expressed in many varieties. Tablets come in a range of sizes from 7 inches to 11 inches, ones with slide out keyboards and hybrids that dock or clamshells with detachable screens. The designs will continue to evolve to address user demands. I am convinced consumers are still not sure what to use them for. I don't believe we will have universal adoption of tablets until we have mastered instantaneous synchronization across platforms and hardware. That is the next major leap we will see. While tools like Dropbox and Google Apps get us closer, they still are too cumbersome.

Some day, just like we saw in films like Avatar, real-time synchronized tablets, touch tables, consoles and other marvelous technology will be fully integrated in our lives. We are stuck with a cumbersome array of devices for different purposes. These devices might just be an iteration of the many devices we will see in the future.

Last, we will arrive sooner if we collaborate. Open innovation where companies share breakthroughs can only help the whole community of tablet developers. Making the users experience universally easy and convenient through syncing technology and cloud computing alone will propel the tablet far beyond the experience it allows today. Competition is great but maybe it should be left to companies racing to best embody both of these, not creating parallel ecosystems, app stores and incompatible hardware.

Hurdles like these still lie ahead. In the meantime, let's be patient with tablets and embrace a lab coat approach to our technology use and experience. Today the consumer and technician are kindred travelers in this dreamlike world of technology, where in short order, we can have that which we imagine.

John Bergquist works in tablet and mobile technology development as a member of the Intel Appup Developer Program and a Meego community member. He is the Communications Director for both Soma Games and Code-Monkeys and a mobile app evangelist.

 

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Comments

[Chris Skaggs]

07:55 PM on 05/18/2011

In my mind MeeGo is the wild card here with an unclear future. Intel certainly seems to be "all-in" and with their capital behind it it could be more or less forced into market. Also GeorgleMark, just above this text box is a link to a story from Computex where Intel will announce 10 tablets they are launching - it seems a fair bet they will mostly run MeeGo. Perhaps the issue here is really that MeeGo was announced and promoted prematurely when the OS just isn't at the same place as Android - in many places that's caused confusion.

[GeorgieMark]

01:56 PM on 05/19/2011

"Computex where Intel will announce 10 tablets they are launching"

They aren't making the tablets themselves they'll be showcasing tablets powered by their newest processors running on Various OSs (mostly Windows7 and Android and I wouldn't hold my breath for a meego tablet)

The reason that Intel went into the OS business with their Moblin OS (later fused with Nokia's Maemo and re-branded Meego) was Microsoft's failure to provide adequate support for Intel's Atom processor that powered netbooks. Back in the day Netbooks were catching up with laptops in total sales and manufacturers were scrambling to capture the market. Enter the ipad. Netbook sales stalled slumped and dropped. Everyone shifted their focus to tablets.

Intel will try to team up with any platform just as they did with Microsoft Windows. They are not really interested in an OS. With Nokia ditching MeeGo and with no other major OEM willing to pick-up where Nokia has left off there is little chance of surviving.

[GeorgieMark]

03:31 PM on 05/18/2011

One wonders, Nokia and Intel touted the Meego platform when they first joined forces about a year ago, since then, the only tablet we ever heard of that run Meego was Wetab. As of yet there is no meego apps store akin to Android iOS BB etc or at least no-store worth mentioning. Even WP7 app store has grown exponentially as Microsoft is enlisting more and more developers for its platform (passed the 10K apps benchmark in less time than the Android Market did).

As Nokia is moving towards replacing its OS with WP7 and with Microsoft alleged to make good on its promise for a slender and slick OS in Win8 I think Meego is dead on arrival.

I could be mistaken though.

[John Bergquist]

08:33 PM on 05/18/2011

What to pay attention to really are the apps regardless of platform being Meego, Android or iOS etc....

Meego, being a Linux supported open UI, will continue to exist and won't be completely dependent on brand adoption. Having Nokia on board certainly helped but they are just one of many.

[GeorgieMark]

01:38 PM on 05/19/2011

But that's the entire point it's the apps that make or break a platform.

Linux is not exactly the ecosystem where apps flourish and an OEM needs a robust apps store to sell hardware. Irrespective of whether the device's OS or hardware are top of the grade, X device is doomed to failure if there are no cash flows after purchasing the device.

Apple were the alpha and omega of mp3 music players despite that their hardware was lagging (compared to competitive offerings) because they had a dedicated music/films store.

The same with the original iphone. Shoddy camera, no 3G, bad bluetooth protocols and yet it captured the public's imagination not because other OEMs made inferior phones, far from it, it's just that Apple's offering was an augmented package a hardware kit bundled with services.

Conversely, see the fate of Motorola's Xoom. A very nice piece of kit, good solid platform but a flop in the market. Why? No dedicated apps. I think that's the reason behind Google's decision that their next Android upgrade (ice-cream sandwich) will be bridging the gap between tablet and smartphone app development.

But I digress, Meego has still to show audiences a robust apps store. Google is hard at work with its Chrome Apps store (unveiled before the masses saw Chromium OS at work), Microsoft is trying to sign on board WP7 developers at a frantic rate (and hinting at a Win8 store). We've seen nothing worthwhile on the Meego side.