Talking a word about TABLETS, We got tablets a couple of years ago to fill the gap between – “The Smartphone” and “A Laptop.” It’s not certain whether there was a need to fill that void, but what we got was – a little more personal than a Laptop, and also more spacious than a Smart Phone. Some of the most popular among them were the iPad – which was huge; we can say it was just a kind of bigger iPhone! It also gained popularity very quickly. But, people already loved the iPhone! Isn’t it?
Then we got way more tablets that followed up in the next two years! No doubt they were better, but they seemed to go off!
Now in 2017, with continuous improvements in technology, we have seen an evolution in all these three categories – Smart Phones, Tablets, and Laptops. And they have been seen to kind of get converged! Our Smartphones, do more and more. If we look back, in 2010 the definition of a big Smartphone was something with a 4.3” display. All the big Smartphones had a screen of 4.3” back then. Today, a 4.3-inch phone is actually termed as ‘compact’ by our industry.
The laptops also got a transition from then to now – There are still plenty of big laptops, but we also started to see laptops that are nearly as thin, and as light as a Tablet! So they again burn the line, and there are also laptops which can do both, like a Two-in-one. So they removed the necessity of a tablet that tried to fit right in between a phone and a laptop!
That can be seen even in paper records. Tablets are a dying breed by volume. Tablet purchases in the last few years have started declining surprisingly. They didn’t even go up; they began to lessen in purchases. 24 million tablets were shipped in 2014, while only 16 million tablets shipped in quarter 2015. That’s like a massive 20% drop in sale in just a year! That’s not a little drop-off. That’s actually a big drop off!
This reason for this fall in sales could be the fact that the Smartphones are getting larger and larger nowadays, while the laptops are getting smaller and smaller, have sort of pushed tablets into an ‘unnoticeable’ category. And now, even if they continue to evolve better and better, get more optimised, have better accessories shipped with them, you can game on them, surf the web on them, but the one fact which got these into that category will never change – Smartphones and Laptops replaced them, after they began to have specifications similar to the tabs. This made the total usage base of the tablets hide its peak and fall down. That doesn’t mean that making the tablet was a wrong decision. The discovery of Tablets was great. The initial hike with the iPad and all the huge competition of them like between Samsung and Apple was flawless, but then, it’s just levelled off.
The reason to explain why people are buying less of them can be mainly two.
First, the people don’t need now to upgrade their tablets due to plenty of improvements and specs transition in the Smartphone industry! People upgrade their phone usually in every twelve to eighteen months. And that also made the Smartphone more capable of replacing the tablets.
Secondly, on the top of all that convergence, there also have been a genuine lack of any super exciting, crazy new features, in tablets in recent years, which made them degrade more and more and make people forget them.
So in the end, tablets tried a lot to fit into a place where they can have a value of themselves.
They pushed themselves into what laptops were doing in the last few years, but also to stay as friendly as a Smartphone as well. But unfortunately, they did not actually succeed in having that place, as the void was completely filled when we had smartphones and laptop improvements.
There can still be a smaller group of people who want tablets and would like to have tablets in their use basis. One could buy his kid a tablet if he doesn’t want to give him a smartphone, but something to keep him entertained instead. It could also be the casual gamer who wants a bigger screen but doesn’t want to carry his laptop all around. So some of these exceptions could still find the tablets little useful for them. But, if we have a broader look at today’s world and our actual needs, we come to know that tablets have been replaced by better gadgets, for the better!
