Tablet Tabula Rasa

Despite having used and abandoned multiple tablets over the years, I'm still looking forward to Apple's much anticipated iSlate Tablet (or whatever it will be called). Of course those old tablets were used primarily for work, and the new Apple tablet is primarily a consumer device that might augment my professional life with no intention of being a replacement for my work laptop. 

Simply put: tablets are great for content consumption, but lousy at content creation. And most consumers are content consumers (hence the name) not content creators. Professionally, if your job entails looking at websites or watching YouTube videos then a tablet is perfect for this purpose, but if your job actually requires you to write and edit documents longer than a few paragraphs, work in spreadsheets crunching numbers or creating and giving presentations then laptops are still a better bet - especially if they are coupled with an external monitor.    

The primary reason is information density - a place where tablets  historically have fallen short for several reasons. The small screens dictated by the form-factor limits constrain both the size and weight of the screen limiting the amount of information accessible without scrolling or clicking through multiple pages. This is further exacerbated by the now dominant 16:9 screen form factor  - the adoption of which were driven by consumer demands for watching HD content on their laptops. Although to be fair the 16:9 screen is great for reading documents if you orient them vertically. 

Consumers haven't flocked to adopt tablets - primarily due to the high cost of the devices coupled with their less than stellar capabilities.  Tablets have had success though primarily in niche workplaces like medicine and mobile field workforces which utilize software-driven forms.  I've used tablets from Fujitsu, Motion, HP and Lenovo, and each time I always ended up giving them to coworkers because they hampered my productivity. What normally took micro-seconds requiring little thought invariably turned into a task requiring multiple seconds and attempts to accomplish. Repeat that frustrating scenario a few hundreds of times a day and no amount of coolness (and they are cool) could make up for the productivity hit using a tablet entailed. 

For more see http://www.thommitchell.com/2010/01/11/tablet-tabula-rasa/