Tablets: These should be revolutionary. In practice, they're not, and I'm trying to sort out why.
The biggest gripe is that there's no single use for which a tablet is a preferred option, other than as an e-book reader, and numerous others for which it is distinctly less-than-optimal, with smaller smart (or "dumb") phones being better for on-the-go comms, and full-featured laptops or notebooks being preferably for virtually all compute applications.
I've used tablets for about a decade now (first an Android Samsung device, 3+ years on an Onyx BOOX e-ink ebook-reader, though it's really an Android tablet), and my assessment of them as less-than-serious compute devices remains, even with the addition of an external keyboard and Termux (a Linux-on-Android environment). There are simply too many compromises from the Android environment. And everything I've seen about iOS suggests that they would be worse as a general-compute device, despite some clear wins over Android/Google/Samsung elsewhere.
I'm not sure if tablets can break through or not. I'm leaning increasingly to a number of independent devices: tablet (for ebooks and podcasts), laptop (for real work), a small phone, preferably feature, possibly something like the Light Phone, independent image/video and audio capture (dedicated camera, point-and-shoot or DSLR, handheld audio recorder, see NYT's reviews: <https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-voice-re...> ... and note that reporters make heavy use of such equipment). At this point I'm not even sure I want a general-purpose phone of any sort given the heavy abuse of that channel (smishing / robocalls / fraud / harassment), though a wide-spread alternative doesn't seem to have emerged yet.
That's harsh, dude! ;-)
Tablets: These should be revolutionary. In practice, they're not, and I'm trying to sort out why.
The biggest gripe is that there's no single use for which a tablet is a preferred option, other than as an e-book reader, and numerous others for which it is distinctly less-than-optimal, with smaller smart (or "dumb") phones being better for on-the-go comms, and full-featured laptops or notebooks being preferably for virtually all compute applications.
I'd made that case in a Diaspora* post a few years back: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...>.
The most detailed critique is in this comment to that thread, with a (sorry, poorly-rendering at most screen-widths) table:
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...>
I've used tablets for about a decade now (first an Android Samsung device, 3+ years on an Onyx BOOX e-ink ebook-reader, though it's really an Android tablet), and my assessment of them as less-than-serious compute devices remains, even with the addition of an external keyboard and Termux (a Linux-on-Android environment). There are simply too many compromises from the Android environment. And everything I've seen about iOS suggests that they would be worse as a general-compute device, despite some clear wins over Android/Google/Samsung elsewhere.
I'm not sure if tablets can break through or not. I'm leaning increasingly to a number of independent devices: tablet (for ebooks and podcasts), laptop (for real work), a small phone, preferably feature, possibly something like the Light Phone, independent image/video and audio capture (dedicated camera, point-and-shoot or DSLR, handheld audio recorder, see NYT's reviews: <https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-voice-re...> ... and note that reporters make heavy use of such equipment). At this point I'm not even sure I want a general-purpose phone of any sort given the heavy abuse of that channel (smishing / robocalls / fraud / harassment), though a wide-spread alternative doesn't seem to have emerged yet.