Are Tablets Dead Or We Just Haven't Found the Right Fit Yet?

Back in 2012, I was crazy about buying the original Nexus 7 and now, fast forward to 2016, no one cares about Tablets anymore. With smartphone display sizes rapidly reaching tablet-size domain, has this space lost its charm? To find out, we’ll have to dig deeper into the roots of the “tablet age”.

The concept of tablets dates back to the sci-fi works of the past – 2001: A Space Odyssey, original Star Trek series but in reality, tablets came to existence much later with the introduction of the touchscreen operated GRiDPad in 1989 which ran MS-DOS operating system. Coming in at $3000 price tag, it wasn’t as successful as its successor, the Palm Pilot which came for a fraction of its price. But the idea of tablets still wasn’t adopted by the masses.

Then there was the Apple Newton PDA which was highly successful for its time. 

In the year 2000, Microsoft tried its luck in the tablet game with the Microsoft Pocket PC and later the Tablet PC but they failed, mostly due to their limited functionality and prohibitively high pricing.  Most of the tablets in the early days were operated with a digital pen or “stylus” and not with touch input which we are used to today.

Due to the failure of many tablet devices from different manufacturers, the tablet market remained stagnant for a few years until 2009 when a few Android tablets came to the market but were still pained by the same shortcomings as their previous-gen counterparts.  While some Android manufacturers still made tablets in the beginning of 2010, everything was about to change in the world of tablet computers in the beginning of the second quarter of 2010.

On April 3rd 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, a tablet with a 9.7” display which helped shape the future of tablets. It was the most successful tablet at the time of its release.  Samsung followed into the footsteps of Apple with the Galaxy Tab series later in the year which were based on Android OS and in the coming years launched several new variants in the Galaxy Tab series in typical Samsung style with varying sizes.

In late 2011, Apple launched the iPad 2, the successor to the original iPad and Samsung came up with the successor of the original Galaxy Tab - Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus which was based on Android Honeycomb, an Android version aimed at tablets. Motorola came with their Android 3.0 Honeycomb based Xoom tablet. At a similar time, companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble came up with their Android-based tablets, the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet respectively. They were marketed as e-book readers and found a lot of the success with their target audience. Kindle Fire sold over 7 million units and the Nook Tablet 5 million units. While the market was flooding with more and more Android tablets, Blackberry, which was still a popular brand for enterprise users at the time, decided to jump in with its own tablet – Blackberry Playbook which ran their proprietary operating system - Blackberry Tablet OS but it received less than favorable response from consumers and media alike.

In March 2012, PC Magazine reported that 31% of U.S. Internet users owned a tablet, used mainly for watching videos and reading news. The top-selling line of devices was Apple's iPad with 100 million units sold between its release in April 2010 and mid-October 2012, but iPad market share was down to 36% in 2013 with Android tablets rising to capture 62% share. Apple continued with the iPad series by launching the iPad 3 in the beginning of 2012, which didn’t do that well with consumers. There were issues with performance and overheating, which led to it being discontinues the same year.

On October 26th 2012, Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 and a special Windows 8 Edition for mobile devices (mainly tablets and netbooks) – Windows RT. It was designed for the 32-bit ARM based architecture. Microsoft and ASUS came with the first wave of Windows RT tablets namely, Surface tablet and the VivoTab RT. Windows RT was met with poor response as it wasn’t as fully functional as its desktop Windows 8 brother and couldn’t run traditional desktop apps. Given the poor sales of Windows RT, it was soon discontinued but Microsoft still supports it with updates. While Google was previously just aiming at smartphones with its Nexus series, it dived into the tablet space with the Nexus 7(2012) manufactured by ASUS and also the Nexus 10, manufactured by Samsung. Keeping with its product cycle Apple came us with the iPad 4 later in 2012 with the iPad 2 still available in stores. There were a lot of Android tablets that allowed voice calls like a phone but they were more popular in emerging markets.

But in 2013, Microsoft was targeting a different audience

with the Surface Pro 2.

Apple, Google, Samsung and many other OEMs came with more tablets over the course of the next two years but Apple held most of the market because of the big app developer community for iOS which was focusing on tablet-specific apps whereas Android apps for tablets were basically scaled up versions of the phone apps and weren’t intuitive. But in 2013, Microsoft was targeting a different audience with the Surface Pro 2 running a full-fledged Windows 8.1 Pro and it was a hybrid between tablets and laptop referred to as 2-in-1 and it received fairly positive reviews. 

In Q4 of 2014, more than 24 million tablets were shipped but that number dropped to 16 million in Q4 of 2015. The question that comes to our mind is why we needed tablets in the first place? In 2009-10, the average smartphone screen size was between 2.6”-4” and to consume multimedia, people had to use their laptops which were more of a 14”+ size typically and were also clunky at the time. So something in the middle was required, something portable, thus enter tablets. Typically, Android tablets were between 7” and 10” sizes and similar case was with Apple’s iPad mini and Air series that followed the original iPad series.

So, why did tablet sales start dropping rapidly?

While the average smartphone display size rose to around 4.5”- 5.5” in 2015 and the phones about the 5” barrier were termed “phablets” – phones + tablets, filling the void between smaller phones and 7” tablets. The “phablet” era began in 2011 with the original Samsung Galaxy Note, coming with a 5.3” display size which was criticized at the time of being too large for a phone and it included a stylus. The Note series was to become the first successful attempt at “phablets” – bridging the gap between phones and tablets. The “phablets” were growing in sales each quarter, while tablets sales were becoming stagnant and we all can thank Samsung for that. They started the trend for large-screen devices.

In 2014, Apple, a key player in the smartphone and tablet space, watching the market trend, dived into the bigger phone market with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus with a 4.7” and 5.5” display size and now taking on Samsung’s Note lineup with the 6 Plus.  

In 2015, OEM’s tried a different approach with tablets, trying to replace laptops with tablets. Microsoft released Windows 10, the successor to Windows 8.1 with a Tablet mode with easier navigation for the interface and made Windows 10 a unified platform for desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, Xbox One and all-in-one devices.

First attempt was by Apple in September with the iPad Pro, which is 12.9” tablet with a faster CPU (“desktop-grade”, according to Apple) as compared to the iPad Air 2, 4 GB of RAM. While it may be the fastest tablet on paper, it still runs iOS which is limited in functionality and features and I think it’s just a blown up iPad Air 2, starting at $799 with two accessories – the Apple Pencil (stylus) and an attachable keyboard, both of which are sold separately. I don’t think the iPad Pro takes advantage of the horsepower it has underneath due to the limited functionality of the OS. The iPad Pro received mixed reviews from the media.

At a similar time, Google announced the Android-powered Pixel C tablet with a 10.2 inch display. While coming in at a relatively cheaper base price at $499, it faces the same issues that the iPad Pro faces – limited OS functionality, but here it is more pronounced as iOS still has a lot of tablet optimized apps but Android on the other hand doesn’t. While the iPad Pro offers split-screen multitasking, the Pixel C doesn’t, at least at the moment. Google also offers a detachable keyboard for the Pixel C, coming in at $149. While the Pixel C has been praised for its beautiful design, it still lags behind the competitors in terms of functionality. At the same event, Google even announced the Nexus 5X and 6P, and the 6P offers a 5.7” display size, which is already quite large in size.

The most interesting offering is from Microsoft – the Surface Pro 4.

The most interesting offering is from Microsoft – the Surface Pro 4. The Pro 4 comes with a 12.3” display size with various Intel Processor, RAM and SSD offerings. It runs the latest Windows 10 OS and the top-end variant comes with an Intel 6th-gen Skylake i7 CPU and is powerful enough to cater to the needs of most people. It runs a full-fledged Windows 10 and can run all traditional windows applications, you can edit videos, play graphically intensive games and have the entire windows desktop legacy apps at your disposal. This tablet can surpass the other two offerings with a huge margin in terms of functionality and starts at a similar price tag as the iPad Pro and it has been praised by the media all over the world.

In 2015, tablet sales did not increase but Apple remained the largest seller but its market share dropped below 25%. On March 21st 2016, Apple announced yet another iPad – iPad Pro (9.7” display), a shrunk down version of the bigger 12.9” iPad Pro, still plagued with limited functionality of yesteryear. Apple still thinks there is hope for the iPad Pro, time will certainly tell soon with the sales figures.

While iOS and Android tablets will drop in sales significantly over the course of this year, Windows tablets will increase in sales slowly as more manufacturers start making Windows 10 tablets. After a few generations of Windows tablets, the prices will go down making them viable for the average consumer and it will sooner or later replace laptops for the average person who use their laptop for multimedia, web-browsing and light gaming but will not completely erase the existence of traditional laptops. 

While Windows tablets will not be for everyone, they’ll soon find the right buyers.

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