The latest numbers from market research firm IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker show that Apple remains the largest vendor in a declining tablet market, shipping 10.9 million iPads in the second quarter of 2015. While the iPad continues to be the best-selling tablet, its worldwide market share fell below 25% as Apple faced increased competition from low-cost rivals Lenovo, Huawei and LG.
With phones hitting 5.5-6.0″ now, there’s very little need for tablets.
Most tablets out there are already good enough for the content consumption things they were designed for. People watch video (Netflix, Youtube, etc..), listen to music, read books, browse the web, email and use social media apps on tablets. All Apple tablets (especially since the iPad 2) are more than sufficient for these things. Most Android tablets since the Nexus 7 are also more than sufficient for these things too. Users will be holding on to these devices for a longer period of time just like they are holding on to PCs/laptops for longer.
The big revolution in tablets came in 2010 when the original iPad was released. Since then it’s been minor, incremental bumps.
I thought the big revolution was mini tablets. We called them smartphones at the time.
There are reasons why Tablets is here to stay:
Businesses: Viewing emails, browsing the internet, taking notes, for this reason, there is no reason to upgrade to the latest tablet. And for the most part, this can be replaced by a smartphone. For manufacturing companies, I can see the use of it for storing templates/layouts for reference in production. Accessing intranet apps within the company and other technical usage. Some of the tablets here must be rugged and can withstand humidity and heat, so consumer tablet here is not an option. 8″ and 10″ tablets are the most useful for technical users because of the wider screen.
Education: A research tool, students may prefer to have a keyboard. I would rather use a chromebook here than a tablet.
Consumer: For entertainment, socializing. Are there any useful functions of a tablet other than these? A tablet really is a waste of money for consumers.
It needs to morph as a niche product. Even if I have large sum of money, buying a tablet is the lowest in my priority list.
I completely disagree.
I’m stuck to a PC during my working hours, but at home the PC rarely gets turned on. For browsing pictures, watching videos, social networking, sailing the web, and some gaming, nothing beats laying in a lawn chair and lazily interact using your index. For this, a large-screen cellphone can do OK, but my Nexus 7’s screen is quite a bit more comfortable than even my Galaxy Note II’s, and an 8″ to 9″ would be even better.
Yes, the on-screen keyboard is vastly worse than a hardware one, but still the balance is so positive for the tablet, that days and days go by without ever turning on the PC.
It’s true what other people point out here: My N7 2012 remains perfectly adequate for these tasks (unless it runs Lollipop, or it stops doing anything adequately). I would like to upgrade to something a bit larger, but even though it is there for less than 250€, I don’t want to throw away a perfectly serviceable piece of hardware.
FOr me, 5.5″-6.0″ ain’t even near to being large to do what I want to do on a tablet. Typing on a touchscreen is already a major nuisance as-is, let alone typing on such a cramped-up keyboard as to fit inside a screen like that, for example. Another thing is that everything is simply too small and there is no remedy to that other than upping the size of the display.
The things I use a tablet for are: reading books, reading comics and occasionally browsing the web if I don’t have a laptop or desktop at hand. None of those things are comfortable or even feasible to do on a phone.
There’s a significant group of people out there for whom the smartphone is the primary computer in their house, or in many cases (particularly non first-world countries) the only computer they have. I know lots of teenagers who only go to a desktop/laptop PC when they need to do some project for school, and even then most of the research they’ve done prior was on their phones. Their computing “life” basically started on phone sized screens, and that’s their comfort zone, for better or worse.
“With phones hitting 5.5-6.0″ now, there’s very little need for tablets.”
Hardly. There is huge market (children) for cheap 7″ tablets that cost as little as $40. A 6″ phone costs at least $400.
Edited 2015-07-31 03:40 UTC
Yes, but the big name companies tracked by IDG aren’t interested in selling $40 devices.
I would love to hear about that 7″ tablet for $40.
Here you can buy a Nokia 1320 for Euro 180 (including VAT) which is a mighty fine phone still but has never received any attention (it is basically a lowend version of the 1520 which is about 300 euro now)
http://www.pendo.com.au/pendopad/pendopads-google-play/pendopad-7-d…
Currently available for AUD49 (USD34) at Coles supermarkets in Australia.
Thanks for looking it up, but it says out of stock, 99 Dollar, 25 Dollar shipping and I don’t live in Australia.
(horrible specs as expected)
I mostly use them for e-books, and may be running some ScummVM games
The trend for screens to go to a 16:9 ratio just so that HD movies can play without a black band is fine as far as it goes.
I have an iPad Mini. The screen ratio is perfect for e-book reading. It also conatins lots of PDF version of manuals. These documents are formatted for A4 (or shudder letter) page sizes. Their aspect ratio is far closer to 4:3 than 16:9 will ever be.
Best tool for the job and all that.
For my use case, even phablet phones are just not the right tool. Sorry.
Tablets offer a better experience simply because of the larger physical screens they offer over phones, though I won’t consider a sub-8″ tablet any more because that’s the bare minimum to feel at all comfortable with.
My 10.5″ Tab S is really nice to use (and, yes, Samsung do even larger screen sizes) because the onscreen keyboard is big enough to avoid typos. I find phone screens, even in landscape, are a *total* pain in the backside to type on via the onscreen keyboard.
The only downside with tablets is that when the screen is large enough to use without struggling, the device will no longer fit in your pocket. I just carry mine in a bag, since I carry other stuff in the same bag so it’s no big deal.
I don’t know if I agree. I actually like smaller smart phone screens and then use tablets at home. I leave one on the coffee table by the TV and use it all the time. I switch between an Android device and an iPad MIni.
People who love Phablets don’t need a tablet anymore. The rest of us with normal sized pockets prefer smaller smartphones and tablets for other consumption.
If you consider the smart watch movement as the next batch of phones with Phablets as the “tablets”, this all makes sense.
I think this is mostly a saturation issue. The new product was bought by people when it first came out those buyers have either decided they need it or they don’t. If they are sticking with it then they likely have less of a reason to use some other product and have reduced upgrades in that market.
Tablets are fairly fast for the limited amount of interaction on them so nothing is pushing upgrades except attrition so the market is simply smaller then people expected when they compared it to the phone market and initial sales are starting to fall off.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. We have 4 tablets in our household and they get a great deal of use. We haven’t bought one in almost 2 years because, really, the tablets we have do a great job.
It’s likely we will buy replacements at about a 2 year cycle which is tangibly less frequent the we upgrade the phones we use.
K
Tablets have their place, they’re just not the replacement for desktops/laptops some people were convinced they were.
One place I’ve noticed tablets being used more is in place of POS systems. It’s nothing new but it does seem to be gaining ground in that area – at least around here.
So the big issue is that tablet vendors have tried to treat tablets like phones – meant to be replaced every year or so, with very little support, and a very limited warranty.
Tablets have their place, but they need to be supported and warrantied more liked traditional computing devices.
Good tablets are inherently more expensive, but yet they’re in no different boat than the cheapest tablets in terms of support, fixes, etc.
For example, my wife’s iPad Mini has a broken glass plate now (due to our children dropping it twice; the first put a small fracture across the glass, the second time did a lot more damage). When she asked Apple about replacing the glass, they wanted her to buy a new one; they’d give a discount for turning over the old one, but that was it.
Or, Motorola – my MotoX 2nd Gen recently got a bath. The chatroom tech person said a technician would refuse to repair once they saw it was water damage and simply send it back to me. The online RMA form wouldn’t let you submit for water damage; though they did suggest you could call for “minimal water damage”.
All this despite me saying “I’ll pay for the repair”. (I haven’t had a chance to call them yet.)
Even with small appliances that are warrantied for repair, what they often actually do is throw the returned item in the dumpster and send back a new one out of the warehouse. I’ve had that happen with cameras and a GPS.
Small inexpensive electronics are disposable. If you can’t replace the defective part yourself at home, the “technicians” at the warranty return centers can’t do it either.
That is a joke; and I’m not talking about “inexpensive electronics”.
For my MotoX ($500), I just need to get the screen replaced. For my wife’s iPad ($350-$400), she just needs the glass replaced.
For my Asus TF700 (Transformer Infinity), it needs a board replaced ($500); the board costs $170; they’ll actually repair it.
Those are less expensive than the GPS in my example above. It needed a rubberized button replaced. Sent it in for “repair” and received a new unit. I think companies keep a shelf of replacement products because it’s easier, faster, and probably cheaper than actually doing repairs to small consumer-grade electronics.
Modern electronics are glued and soldered. They aren’t designed to be repaired.
And that’s an industry problem that should be resolved. There is no reason it should not be repairable.
TFTFY.
Tablets had the potential to be more than large phones, but then the ball was dropped.
This in particular on the Android side where Fragments UI never really got any traction (in part thanks to one too many iOS dev thinking Android also needed “HD” tablet specific apps), and then Google abandonded the tablet UI completely with 4.3 (after having semi-abandoned it on smaller tablets with 4.2).
Best i can tell they didn’t want Android tabelts to overlap with ChromeOS, and thus trying to make Android tablet to be something productive was made a non-topic.
Here is the thing, when Android 3.0 was released, tablets with full size A USB ports quickly showed up. Thus allowing USB drives, keyboards and mice to be plugged in (never mind gamepads). But then came 3.1 onwards and Google made a mess of things by screwing up storage permissions. Thus anything that was not primary “external” storage (aka anything internal but outside of /data) was made read only. Over night the use of SD cards and USB drives was made a no-go.
Best i can tell there was two reasons for this. Google trying to push their Drive service and “cloud storage” in general, and MAFIAA leaning on them for stronger DRM before music and video was added to the Android Market (later renamed Google Play).
The only reason to buy a new tablet is if the old one is broken. I had a 10¨ one bricked it. Got a nexus 7 nice price, decent (if small) screen and android updates.
But I wanted something larger. After walking around the department store found that I really liked the surface pro 3, good hires screen, 2:3 form, but didn’t like the price and Windows 10.
So I settled on a 13 inch Toshiba Cromebook, 13″ 1920×1080 IPS screen, decent keyboard, nice trackpad. lightweight, battery life is good. Browses quick enough and only 324 euro (incl. tax/shipping)
…as a screen size similarity issue, so much as it is a problem with OEMs treating tablets like 2nd or 3rd class devices. they and never got, and mostly still don’t get, the attention to quality that laptops or phones get.