Regardless of the fact of just how much tablets are being used world wide; in tech world they are hot topic. There are speculations about just how far they can go in terms of usability. Some say that time is near when they will completely replace laptops. Others say that it will never happen. While the fact always lies in the middle here are the biggest five reasons why they have not been able to replace laptops as yet.
- Cost: The biggest factor is cost. Its one factor that affects everyone regardless of geographical location and almost all tablets are high on it. I recently checked the market and found that an Apple iPad costs as much IBM 5420 laptop and that is huge especially if you consider the specs of both. Add to this the fact that there is hardly anything that you can do on tablet and can’t on laptop. In simple words the price tags of tablets represent them as something luxurious and of course not everyone can afford luxuries.
- Business Use: One of the biggest selling point of laptops is their business use. Most organizations give their employees laptops to work, some Desktops but there will be hardly few if any which give away tablets. Again one reason is cost and the other reason is usability. Tablets are mainly used personally and the tasks they are really good at are Book reading, movie watching and games playing. If they are to succeed against laptops than manufacturers will have to make a real good business use of them.
- Peripheral Support: One way tablets can be a lot more useful while maintaining their touch screens and light weight advantage intact is to add better support of common laptop accessories like Keyboard, mouse etc. It feels great to have a tablet rather than laptop to watch a movie or to read a novel while in bed at night because of their light weight but when you need to type a blog post or to access a business application to do some work the preference will be laptop. By adding easy support of common tools like keyboard, mouse this can be done by using tablet as well.
- Smart Phones with big screens: Another main reason why tablets have not been able to replace laptops is that they have been caught in the mantra that tablets are just an advance form of Smart Phones. They are considered among masses as an expensive and advance form of Smart Phones which are more good at playing games, socializing etc than there any other productive use. Tablets will have to get rid of this mindset of people about them. For that they will have move away from Smart Phones and focus more on laptop side of things.
- Memory: Another thing that is haunting tablets is their small memory sizes. Most tablets have internal memories equal to more or less than those of high end Smart Phones. Tablets need to have bigger internal storage and again their comparison should not be with Smart Phones.
Is there something else that I missed?
