Sales of Tablet PCs not taking off
posted Aug 11th 2004 1:40PM
Not that this wasn't already sadly obvious, but a new report confirms that sales of Tablet PCs are just not hot and that they're being outsold by regular laptops by a factor of 100 to one. They're not falling, it's just that they aren't picking up like they were supposed to. The big problem? Besides their admittedly limited appeal, Tablet PCs still cost too dang much, so it's hard to convince a lot of people who might actually find the whole pen-input thing useful (like students, for example) that they should spend the extra cash when they can get a perfectly good laptop for less. We keep hoping that sooner or later the cost of the technology will come down enough that it'd be feasible to make every laptop also double as a Tablet PC, but at the rate things are going Microsoft might abandon the Tablet PC operating system before that ever happens.
-Price parity with laptop (so all features below in a laptop too!)
-Thinkpad-like 'trackpoint'. I won't use a scratchpad, and when I use the keyboard, don't make me pick up that pen ...
-Awesome battery longevity - 6+ hours of interactive use (as well as sleep and hibernate modes)
-drop-dead simple docking arrangement. It should be as easy as putting bread in a toaster.
-commit to making replacement pens available for 5+ years. Auto-charge the pen batteries when pen is docked.
-lower the price of OneNote to around $50. More pen-aware software.
-printers should have some sort of local bluetooth or IR support. Walk up to printer and print already! Rather than searching network for the corresponding print queue.
-smallest possible power brick, with cords that retract/wind themselves up. Heaven would be _no_ power brick and a cord that retracted into the tablet, but that's pretty hard to do ...
-screen that's visible in direct sunlight
-Security that's solid but simple. biometric?
I'd pay the extra price as an early adopter but in Australia I can't easily get to try out the things. No-one in the centre of Sydney has them on display, none of the sales staff in the retail chains here know anything about them and the one manufacturer I did contact invited me to drive to an outer suburb Mon-Fri 9am-5pm. As long as I made an appointment first. I'd suggest that they're not selling because they're not available.
The tablet market is LIMITED and will ALWAYS be limited.
People who like to write on yellow tablet pads with pen/pencil are not going to switch to writing with a cheap plastic stylus on glass/plastic and a) having to learn to "write" again and an modified OS.
People who prefer to type and see their thoughts don't want to go to all the manual effort to WRITE out every single freaking letter and word and THEN wait for a PC to convert their scrawlings into a readable typeface.
For 97% of the population, it's pointless technology. It's like an electric page turner for books.
Here's the market for tablet PC's:
a) people who like buying gear to show off to people, "look , it pivots and I can write on it!"
b) people in occupations where a tablet actually saves you time in inputting since the format is a series of tick marks or simple comments and makes data compiling easier for the back office like possibly medical professions and a few others.
and c) the smallest %, people who cannot type, unwilling to learn to type AND are willing AND since this way they don't have to re-type everything ...
All and all, a small field that is being served RIGHT now and it WILL NOT and NEVER get much larger.
Because it's really just an electric yellow pad - you still have to write everything out ...
Just like speak/speech technology - at this point, people who wish to compose notes/letters do not prefer to sit in a cubicle and shout out thoughts ... not that's it's so private at work but who really wants to hear your cube mate spend 10 minutes trying to compose an opening email sentence?
So, tablet PC's are as useful as most speech software - at some point when it can read our brain patterns and SILENTLY compose our correspondence - then you have something!
Why would tablet computing succeed this time around, when it already failed once or twice already? When they started the latest round, I could only see it as evidence that MS had cash to burn, and now we have a $100M+ hole in the ground.
I think the best way to get around the pen availability issue is to simply make the thing compatible with Wacom pens. The arty types could then have airbrushy goodness in their copies of Photoshop, *on the move*. Actually, I can think of a few people who'd jump at that...
Why buy a tablet that is just as big and heavy as a laptop?
In my opinion, these things need a ultra high resolution (1024x768 or slightly larger) 7" or 8.4" TFT display, exterior be no more than 9" long x 7" wide x 1.25" thick. Have a fast CPU, use SD/MMC, CF, PC-Card Slots, and be equipped with a Bluetooth and WiFi embedded. Of course the standard staple of serial, USB, video, LAN, and modem ports well hidden when needed in a "more desktop" mode. (Notice I left out an on board CD-ROM and keyboard - leave those for an external USB/Firewire devices).
Also max weight should not exceed 1.75 - 2 pounds. Its my opinion that most tablets are too bulky to be considered easy to carry. The smaller size suggested puts a tablet in the nice spot bigger than a PDA but smaller than a typical laptop.
Just my opinion on why I haven't adopted a Tablet PC yet....
We have Motion Computing tablets here because sales insisted on them. I can't stand them. The screen is ultra-tiny and runs natively at 1024x768 so text is SMALL.
On top of that, i would much rather type than write on my machine. The only time writing on it would help is to do quick drawings of what a professor is writing on a board as you point out, and to capture signatures on sales contracts which can easily be done with a dongle of some sort.
Yuk.
My tablet has been a life saver. I use it like a piece of paper and only wish the screen could be better seen in the sun.