Tablet market sees first ever year-on-year shipment decline

[Saracen]

.... and never will be.

That sounds just like the bloke that told me that computers in homes would never catch on, or that the early (and £3500) cellular phones "never will be" viable outside of business use.

Absolutes like "never will be" have a way of turning round and biting you in the tush.

When I think of my first PC, barely capable of running AutoCAD in wire-frame, and then think about modern graphics workstations, voice recognition, touch screens on a portable device, never mind the power of even a modern budget cellphone compared to that £10,000 PC (and yes, it was £10k, almost to the penny), it makes me very sceptical about "never" in tech terms.

Tablets have come a hell of a long way in the last three, four or five years so what about the next three, four or five? Or 10? 20? Let alone "never".

[Saracen]

I'm not saying you can't use the onscreen tablet, but I know for a fact I type slower on it, same with the smaller keyboards that you can add to some (got a hp touchpad + keyboard too). I've got both and like I said I hardly use the slate, it's more for consumption than 'doing things' which make me money

I type faster, and for that matter, more accurately, on a 'proper' kb too, but that wasn't what I disagreed with. What I disagreed with was that adding a kb is "paying to turn the slate into a laptop". It certainly isn't for me. It's merely a sometimes-used add-on for a tablet, the whole point of which is a device with the portability of the tablet. And, 'instant on'.

My point was that, for me at least and I'd bet for a large proportion of tablet users, it's a tool to do a job, and so is a laptop. But the jobs, while having some overlap, are actually different.

I can crack a nut with nutcrackets, or a sledgehammer. But, if the job is cracking a nut, nutcrackers are the right tool. You could use a sledgehammer, but it's awkward, cumbersome, and like to pound the nut into paste. But if I want to knock down a wall ....

[OilSheikh]

THANK GOD! Hopefully websites will no longer be made bland, just to make them work in Tablets!

[ET3D]

From my point of view the main problem is that tablets haven't advanced enough in the last year. The Nexus 7 2013 was a high point for Android, and the mid range has been somewhat lacking. I recently gave up an upgraded my Nexus 7 2012 to a Galaxy Tab S 8.4, and it's definitely a better device, but I was really hoping for a better well rounded mid-range device, rather than a mediocre gaming tablet at a high price.

I do see myself as continuing to use a tablet as my main gaming device, and the Galaxy Tab S's screen makes it a nice reading device too. I even noticed that I gravitate toward it for reading mails as opposed to doing it on my laptop. When I get the keyboard case I'll see if I also use it for general web browsing (although I bought a cheap keyboard, not an original Samsung one.)

[ET3D]

THANK GOD! Hopefully websites will no longer be made bland, just to make them work in Tablets!

No, that's to make them work on phones, so no, not going to happen.

[abaxas]

I love less website bling. Some sites are so chewed up with javascript that they should come with a 'minimum spec'. FFS If I cant browse all sites on a 2gig core2duo laptop the issue is not me, it's el-shyto websites.

Internet circa 2003 please. Same stuff, just less crap.

[crossy]

THANK GOD! Hopefully websites will no longer be made bland, just to make them work in Tablets!

Don't agree at all - first of tablets are pretty darned powerful these days, secondly I think you'll find that most decent websites offer separate "mobile" and "desktop" views, and thirdly I can't help but agree with the comment below.

I love less website bling. Some sites are so chewed up with javascript that they should come with a 'minimum spec'. FFS If I cant browse all sites on a 2gig core2duo laptop the issue is not me, it's el-shyto websites. Internet circa 2003 please. Same stuff, just less crap.

I've come across two many fancy websites that seem to be that way because someone in "marketing" thought that they'd be overly clever and obviously did little usability testing. My "favourite" example is these websites where you have drop-down menus with submenus, but to keep the menu displayed you have to hold down the mouse button and move, then release on the option you want. What brainless cretin though that would be preferable to click-to-select-menu then click to select option (or submenu) that you want?

Or those websites that put up a mobile version of the website irrespective of whether you ask for it or not. So you either select "Desktop view" in your 10-12" tablet (which lets be honest is at least as large as a netbook used to be) or click that nice little link that says "Desktop Site" and end up getting the same "Mobile" site as you were just on. And that's particularly annoying when the site in question detects your browser wrongly and insists that you're "mobile".

At least the designers of Hexus avoided those traps. Thanks guys!

Sorry, rant over.