[SHARK] Are Tablets Dead? - Comments Page 1

I'm happy as a lark with my Acer netbook. It's light, portable, robust enough for just about anything I want to do. Has a full keyboard and built-in cover. A tablet, which requires buying and keeping track of a separate cover and keyboard, sounds like a total nuisance to me.

The Fablets (a.k.a. previously (misspelled) as phablets) could potentially compete under some circumstances with the 7" tablets, but definitely not with the 10" ones. Thus, your prediction for the waning market of tablets altogether might apply to the 7" ones not the 10" versions.

Hello Bob,
I have a transformer laptop instead of a tablet, because I wanted a comfortable screen size.

My wife is very happy with her iPad Air 2, having upgraded from the iPad 2.

You are probably correct that the market is now saturated and there is little reason to upgrade existing hardware.

P.S I note that you are now predicting future sales in Q4 of 2016 :)

I have been buying various Nook tablets from Barnes & Noble for quite sometime. I am an avid reader, and I enjoy reading on a tablet my morning newspaper and various magazines and books. Last summer I bought a 7 inch Samsung tablet from B & N. I found 8GB of memory was not enough. Eleven days ago I bought a 32GB 8 inch Samsung tablet from B & N, and I really love it. This past Saturday I added a Samsung 128GB micro SD card from Best Buy, and now I have way more space for my music and anything I want to store. For me, tablets I have not jumped the shark.

I always wondered what "jump the shark" was supposed to mean! Thanks, Bob!

To Joe Farkas: "Phablets" is correctly spelled with the "ph" because the word's origin is a combination of "phone" and "tablet."

That said, I have to agree with the suggestion that the tablet market is saturated. I have a powerhouse laptop that I use for work--a tablet won't do for that purpose for me--and I have a Kindle Fire for play. I don't like playing on my phone because the screen is too small. I have no interest in a large-screen phone because it makes for a phone that's too big for my taste, and the screen is still too small for playing. I'll eventually transition from my laptop to a Surface, but I have no pressing need to upgrade my tablet.

In reading about the death of tablets, I began to wonder if Moses was involved.

I would like to see my corporation offer tablets, and maybe they will in the future if the value proposition is there. But since they already issue laptops, it could be a hard sell.

Anyway, for home users, I can understand the flat sales. Think about the $$ an average home has sunk into hardware for cellphones, desktop/laptop computers, tablets; and the running costs for monthly ISP, monthly cellular plan. Now think about that vs the household incomes growth. Families will make priorities on the yearly budget.

In short, tablets are not going to disappear from the market. It's just a matter of the business and innovation cycle. Next year, the end of some other e-toy will be announced.

I finally took the plunge to buy my first tablet for an irresistible bargain during last year's Black Friday sales. The quad-core CPU makes for surprisingly faster operation than I initially thought. It has great utility in light mobile uses for shopping, banking and reading while on errands, commuting and waiting for appointments, etc. Another great niche it will fit in is to serve as an all-in-one remote control for every household appliance at home. I think a price tag of $50 or under for a 7" quad-core tablet is the threshold to draw in many new buyers.

I predict the tablet market won't grow until they can do it all. I'm surprised so few of them have a USB port, for example. I won't give up my laptop for a tablet until there is an inexpensive option that includes the ability to connect with USB devices (such as my oversized phone). (I'm also looking for an oversized phone with a USB port, then I'll skip the tablet all together.) I'm one of those rare people who have not yet bought a tablet.

I use my tablet for everything. Read, watch Netflex, email, etc. Just got a new desktop which I don't know why, because I just do not get windows l0.

I doubt they will die any time soon. I for one never bought into the "replace yearly" BS that corporations pretend to depend on. My iPad Air is great, especially for travel. Nor do I have any desire for a larger screen. I would hope never to go back to a laptop for air travel especially for weight and hassle trough TSA check in. I refuse to watch movies on even an iPhone 6+ and reading on one is pretty bad as well..

I have a thrid generatin fire that works just fine.
The screen is crisp and sharp and it meets all my needs for a tablet. When it no longer works, I will check out the tablet offerings available, but not before.

In a couple of years when the batteries need replacing, you will have to decide whether to buy another tablet or something else because the battery can't be replaced. This is what Best Buy told me when I asked them to repair my Kindle. They don't fix Kindles.

The real story here is the market's and the press's ongoing obsession with growth as the only metric that matters. As soon as a market segment stops seeing growth, or even just a decline in the growth rate, the press declares that market segment as dead. No more double-digit growth is conflated to mean that nobody's buying or using the product anymore. Time to kill it off in search of the next new fad. The reality is they're still selling in the millions, and many more millions are still actively being used. There's still money to be made here if we'd only stop obsessing over unsustainable growth. The world is going to have to transition to a steady-state economy sooner or later, so why not start changing our thinking now?

No! The novelty of tablet is still in full swing. It just that there are so many cheaper, excellent tablets out there that there are no mentions of the BIG BOYS Brand. These cheaper tablets which carry the latest Android OS are doing great and consumers are saving money. I have 6 tablets home and none of them have the BIG BOYS brand. The most expensive one in my home is the IRULU and it is the worst of the bunch. It is Also the oldest one I have. The others which are Quad Core and faster processor and cost much less. No the tablet market is going strong. Every body I see has one or using their smart phone. Those BIG BOYS price themselves out of the market. That is the problem.

I would also add that a 7" tablet with front and back cameras is perfect to take along on vacation. I had origially thought I wouldn't settle for one smaller than 10" but am amazed that a 7" fits in my palm just perfectly, not too large and not too small with crisp clear graphics. I choose Android because it offers all the features an iPad does and then some yet costs substantially less. An Android tablet provides convenient USB connection and most importantly a familiar file system for storage and retrieval, both of which an iPad lacks.

I love my Nexus 7 tablet. It is great as a universal remote when paired with a Chromecast as well as being a super vacation device for email etc. I have a Nexus 5 also but the screen is a little too small for my aging eyeballs when I want to work comfortably.

Well no, I don't think tablets are dead, but the newer ones are not offering any features except larger screens. My wife and I have Kindle Fires, in addition to our laptops. The Kindle's are excellent readers, and are very handy as e-mail/Internet devices when we don't want to schlep our big laptops. Though Amazon has upgraded Fire tablets, we see no reason to replace units that are working well. There is no "value proposition" here.