Tablets at my local Staples

I happened to be in my local Staples the other night, and noted down the plethora of tablets they had on display:

Samsung Galaxy 10.1
Mororola Xoom
Acer 10"
Dell Streak 7"
Blackberry Playbook

There were a couple of readers sneaking in as well:
Kindle
Nook

Seems like just yesterday this category didn't even exist.

Tablets = Convenience

Dunno why this never occurred to me before. I guess I spend so much time trying to push the characterization that tablets are  “content consumption devices” rather than content creation devices down everyone’s throat that the simpler truth got by me.

What I mean is, there’s not a single thing you do on a tablet (consuming all that content) that you can’t do on both your PC and your smartphone. So why do we need the tablet? It fits in a convenience niche. Where the smartphone is a little too small, and the laptop a little too unwieldy, and the e-ink device a little too single-purpose, that’s where the tablet comes in.

You’re in the kitchen using it for recipes, then you carry it with you to the dining room where maybe you use it to read some newspapers with your food. Next it’s to the living room where you look up songs from your favorite TV show, or read the latest bestseller during commercials or even pull up a Netflix movie (with headphones) while the kids are watching Disney channel. In between all these things you’re keeping up with Facebook and Twitter and the latest news via the web.

There’s nothing the tablet does, that we don’t already have. But it make enough things easier and better, to create a value proposition that is selling millions of devices a year.

Windows 7 tablet on Woot today

http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=14532

I don’t understand what happened here. Woot is where products go to die – in other words Woot gets product lots when they are not selling or reman’d or last year’s models. But here we have a highly anticipated item I didn’t even know was out yet. Why isn’t it at Best Buy instead?

This is an Asus Win7 netbook convertible to tablet, with a multitouch touch screen. It sounds like a viable competitor to the iPad, and it’s only $279.99.

Everybody is going crazy about all the Android tablets on the way. I wasn’t aware that Win7 tablets were more than a gleam in Balmer’s eye at this point.

Something fishy about this…

iPad

Something I wrote to one of my Facebook friends..

Rewind to before Microsoft defined personal computers and imagine a computer modeled on the toaster or the microwave or the tv (but not the vcr), a device that got out of your way and let you do what you got it for. You push one button to turn it on and instantly you're surfing the internet. No booting, no hourglass. You flick your finger and you are reading your email, like changing the channel. No loading drivers, hiccupped virus updates, hours lost trying to get your sound card or printer working so you can just type a letter or play a song. Another flick and you are watching a movie. This device is a disruptive sea-change, that has the potential to reset what we think of as a computer, and pown the whole decade. The price point is half of what was expected. The battery life is twice the expected. They built their own cpu.

Also note the timing - people are in the process of moving their computing experience online and mobile, as proved by the success of Facebook, the iPhone, and the netbook (which only has enough power to run browser-based apps). Note the branching out and away from the desktop pc, with the rise of laptops, smartphones, and readers. How about the overwhelming importance of media in consumer computing - books, music, pictures, movies, rather than spreadsheets and word-processing. Apple has nailed a convergence of vectors driven by the rise of the prevalence of the Internet in computing. The Internet is the computer, and that thing in your hand, be it kvm (keyboard video mouse), laptop, smartphone, or tablet; is no longer your computer, it's just the way you communicate with your world-wide-web, which by the way, resembles Google more and more every day.

You are going to want one of these.