I am living in the future. My phone reads books and tells me where my friends are and scans barcodes. It watches YouTube and IMs and shows me Word docs. It’s the second-coolest kind of phone on the market. It does most of what tablet computers do. (My desktop does the rest.) While it may not do as much as the upcoming Apple Tablet, it seems almost as useful as the $500 JooJoo (formerly the CrunchPad) and, of course, much more useful than the Nook or Kindle (and about the same price with a contract).
My iPhone is already less cool than the Droid, which can now run a search when you point the phone at something and click. You can point it at a restaurant, a book, or a business card. The team behind it is expanding this; there’s just loads to be done here. Technology like this finally makes the smartphone as revolutionary as the web. It does things normal computers can’t.
So why does anyone give a damn about tablets – computers that can’t do things normal computers can?
I know the advantages of tablets. They’re smaller, they’re lighter, touch-sensitive screens make input easier. You can stand and use one. And not one of these advantages doesn’t apply even better to the mobile phone.
Yes, there’s a certain golden compromise, but there’s a hellish equivalent combination of flaws. The tablet can’t pack as much processing power as a laptop, it lacks the tactile response of a real keyboard (or has a keyboard and is a glorified laptop), it needs wifi to go online, and it’s still kind of expensive and its big screen eats up battery power. Some of these problems will be solved in the new tablets, others will be fade away under Moore’s Law. But there’s one problem intrinsic to the tablet: It’s too damn big to have on you at all times.
If you want to keep it on you all day, you will need a bag, and therefore your real boot time will include the trouble of getting it out of the damn bag. A phone takes two seconds to grab from your pocket. This is the fundamental difference.
I’m too young, too inexperienced in the history of the personal computer, to remember when tablets were a cool idea. I have to read about it. Commercially available tablets are under a decade younger than laptops. They’ve been built by giants and startups, marketed to heavy users and light users, yet they’ve remained a novelty since 1989.
My college, which usually gave each student a laptop, gave tablets to one class in 2004. They went back to the more powerful laptops the next year. Tablets didn’t work in this theoretically ideal application, with students who already carry backpacks, need to jot down notes on the fly, and don’t require powerful machines.
They don’t work with businesspeople, who already have a wide choice of laptops and thousands of options for syncing everything to their mobile phones and desktops.
They don’t work for casual users, who can buy a cheap desktop for the same price and let the kids play games. (Casual users – people who just need a web browser and IM app – often share their computers with the whole family. I’m stunned how often tech writers forget that many customers won’t shell out more than $300 for a device that can’t double as their kid’s computer.)
People want smartphones. They’re fancy, we can show them off, we can use them in a bar. (If you’ve seen people use tablet PCs in bars, I hope you’re enjoying your time in San Francisco.) We’ll put up with tiny screens, just like we put up with tiny videos on YouTube. We’ll read all our web sites, especially the ones with custom mobile versions (and we’ll be relieved to see fewer ads clogging our screens as content sites try to hold our waning attention).
We’ll continue to not remember a time when “convergence” was a futuristic concept, or even a concept. We’re like fish without a name for water; phones just work. They work so well that we’re frustrated when we’re disconnected from the internet for a few seconds. A temporarily broken phone is still more useful to us than a working tablet.
And soon, we’ll be pointing our phones at shit and learning all about it, which is fun, which is cool, in a way a dork with a screen cradled in his arm will never be.
’)
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