Notebooks and tablets and ebooks, oh my!

[Zap]

Tablets will outsell notebooks in US this quarter and next year, says NPD

Ebook Readers: Device to Go the Way of Dinosaurs?

Why do they think it so amazing?

I see Ebooks as a precursor to tablets, along with PDAs. Really, it would be like saying "Pentium III to go the way of dinocaurs" because people are now buying something similar, yet newer.

Let me describe a device. It is small and portable, and runs off battery. You interface with a screen that takes up most of one side of the device, and it does not have a keyboard. What am I describing?

As for notebooks, it is because the market is mature. Am I in the market to buy a notebook? Well let's see, I still own FOUR notebook computers, so that is unlikely. How many tablets do I own? Zero. Speaking as a tech geek who likes gadgets in general, I would probably be more likely to buy a tablet in the near future than a notebook. Does that mean notebooks are dead to me?

[Yazoo]

Originally Posted by Zap

Tablets will outsell notebooks in US this quarter and next year, says NPD

Tablets:
*limited disk storage
*display and camera features low end
*hard to type on quickly
*cant run windows or mac based applications

The cross between a cell phone, tablet and laptop will come when one device can do it all, quickly and easily without limitations. E-readers, gps devices, dvd/blu-ray players, mp3 players and other single use devices will fade out. No one wants to carry multiple electronic devices with them.

A laptop that can run windows, mac, ios and android devices with 10-hour battery life is what we need.

[gorcorps]

Meh, there's still space for ebook readers but you'll never see the huge boon of sales that you did before. For a while they were an expensive product with little reason to use over a real book, and the market was dominated by the Kindle. Once Barnes & Noble came in and offered a wifi only version at low price the race was on. When you could have one for less than $100 people bought them like crazy. Now the market is saturated so you won't see that again.

I still prefer the ebook reader over a tablet for battery life and weight savings alone. The built in backlight gave me everything I wanted in an e-reader, so now the question is where do we go from here? Color? Is such a thing really necessary with the high quality LCD screens that are becoming affordable?

[DaveSimmons]

Not enough people read books often enough -- with an ebook reader they can only read plain-text books well, while a tablet also works for illustrated content, comics / manga, video, music, games.

I have an e-ink Kindle and love the battery life, but I also have a Kindle Fire that I use for reading books and it's fine for that too. So if I had to get rid of one it would be the e-ink, and for recommending just one to most people it would be the tablet.

[Zodiark1593]

Originally Posted by Yazoo

A laptop that can run windows, mac, ios and android devices with 10-hour battery life is what we need.

Can we include mowing through current PC games as well, and throw in video rendering, and w/e else anyone can think of.

[crab0]

Originally Posted by Yazoo

Tablets:
*limited disk storage
*display and camera features low end
*hard to type on quickly
*cant run windows or mac based applications

The cross between a cell phone, tablet and laptop will come when one device can do it all, quickly and easily without limitations. E-readers, gps devices, dvd/blu-ray players, mp3 players and other single use devices will fade out. No one wants to carry multiple electronic devices with them.

A laptop that can run windows, mac, ios and android devices with 10-hour battery life is what we need.

I am confused by this, a notebook has a better display and camera than a tablet?

[Sleepingforest]

I think the best option would be a Nexus 10 or iPad quality (think screen, camera, battery life, build quality) tablet with Haswell (or Broadwell and other future, more power efficent CPUs) that can slot into a keyboard dock via Thunderbolt or something for ports, extra GPU power, and more battery life. It should be able to emulate mobile OSes and run their apps.

This way, you can have portable fun and add on serious power.

[buggers]

Nexus 10 is better than iPad