Opinions - Tablet forecasting is not easy

[HEXUS]

The variation in tablet forecasts reveals what an unknown quantity they remain.

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[TheAnimus]

"If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions"

[Tarinder]

A $100-billion-dollar market out of nothing. That's quite something for a technology that'll be just six years old in 2015.

On a purely techy level I'd like to know what kind of chips will power the tablets of 2015. Do Intel and AMD get a serious look-in, or is it ARM all the way?

Having at least one tablet, it seems, is going to be de rigueur, though I wonder if they'll continue to be not much more than scaled-up smartphones. It'll be healthy for the tablet market to go its own way, with genuinely tablet-specific operating systems and software.

[crossy]

On a purely techy level I'd like to know what kind of chips will power the tablets of 2015. Do Intel and AMD get a serious look-in, or is it ARM all the way?

That's the question that I'd like answered too. Consensus - from what I've been able to glean - is that to Intel "mobile" = "Atom" and Atom is a pretty poor performer. That said, since all the current tablet OS's appear to be targetted at ARM, it'd be a brave company that launched a device based on Atom (or whatever AMD have). Unless it was Intel themselves - might see a welcome return of MeeGo.

Having at least one tablet, it seems, is going to be de rigueur, though I wonder if they'll continue to be not much more than scaled-up smartphones. It'll be healthy for the tablet market to go its own way, with genuinely tablet-specific operating systems and software.

Not so sure I agree with the last part of that. Tablet specific operating systems mean more for the poor developers to learn. On the other hand a tablet-aware UI on a smartphone/tablet OS is a different matter - i.e. it'd be a good thing. For example I'm amazed how poor keyboard support is on tablet's, yet keyboards seem to be a widely available peripheral for all of the major tablets. And there's the old conundrum of when does a device stop being a phone and become a tablet - the 7" Blackberry is a tablet, but what's the Dell Streak (5" screen). Is it merely that phones can make calls whereas tablets can't (Skype excepted)?

Tablet tuned apps likewise would be a great idea. For example I compared the mail client on my Android tablet to the equivalent on my wife's webOS tablet - and the Android one is a distant second, it's really only the standard phone one that knows a little about the extra screen it's got. On the other hand the webOS one works really well. I really think that tablets have the capability to take over a lot of what low end laptops do - office, media, light gaming, etc. But the currently accepted price is too high - maybe as more players enter the market this will change in favour of the consumer?

No, where I think it'll get really interesting is when Microsoft launch something into the space ("Windows 8 Tablet Edition"?). Not only do they have the clout to get some really good app tools out there, but also it means the possibility - as you imply - of breaking the current ARM-only hegemony as regards processor choice.

On a related subject - there's been talk about whether the new captain at the helm of HP will reverse her predecessor's capitulation over webOS. If this was the case, then the tablet market could become very interesting. Especially coupled with the mumblings from Google that they've learned the hard lessons over Honeycomb and Ice-Cream Sandwich will be a lot more capable competitor for iOS.