For some tasks they are less useful, but there are still a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on local computing power.
Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts.
Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters?
Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility.
Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket.
Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching.
These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.
10's of Gigaflops is now cheap and in your pocket. But, unlocking your phone is not a use case that's just a hoop you jump through before making a phone call etc.
The phone might happen to have an on board address book and calendar, but this was not a statement about access to computation. It's a statement about cost/benefit and use cases.
> A tablet without google, Netflix, Facebook, Pandora, etc is just far less useful to people.
What you say makes no sense. Tablets are independent computers. You don't have to be connected to the internet to make the most of it. You rely on these internet services only if you choose to. I can read a book, listen to music or watch a video without Pandora, Netflix and Co. A tablet is not a dumb terminal.
Starting from scratch you load a book, music, or video onto an iPad by connecting them to another computer. In that context your just cashing information from another system.
Unless your talking about taking photos / video from it, but that's another story as a cassette deck can also record and play back audio without being a computer.
Granted, you can play games with one or write notes etc, but I just mean they are mostly used as connected devices.
> Starting from scratch you load a book, music, or video onto an iPad by connecting them to another computer.
That doesn't help making the differentiation between a terminal and a standalone computer. Computing has always been a networked thing, we just now have a transport medium that is faster than a floppy disk.
Mainframes were loading punched cards, cloud datacenters are loading user data, and tablets are loading books and video.
And the moment you annotate that PDF or manage synced documents, you are now editing content.
As strange as it might seem early computers where not networked. Early computers generally had a front panel that you could use to load programs by hand making them very much a standalone device.
At least in the context that a modern PC's graphics card is not thought of as a separate computer.
> Starting from scratch you load a book, music, or video onto an iPad by connecting them to another computer. In that context your just cashing information from another system.
And that's true for any desktop or laptop as well. It doesn't make them dumb terminals either.
IBM 2260 video display terminal dates back to 1964 and is rather different from a Teletype though it also does not really have a CPU.
The IBM 3270 on the other hand does significantly more processing on the device and dates to 1972 which would have made it well known in the late 70's computing world.
Less useful to most people, sure, but most people also use their desktop computers for only those same things.
I make music, and for the past several years, I've been pretty much exclusively using my phone and iPad to do it. The touchscreen works very well for my use case, and the audio pipeline is quite flexible with the right apps--in many cases outshining the workflow available on a full PC. I'm working exclusively on the device and using no external services after downloading the apps themselves. That takes far more computing power than a dumb terminal.
Tell that to the people who sit in public transport playing games on their smartphone. A lot of the tasks usually done are impossible without internet connection, but that can be said about almost any computer. That doesn't make them useless, it just restricts them to a (still very useful and big) subset of functionality.
Starting with a new iPad, load a game without connecting to another computer.
Yes, they do processing without connection to an external system. But, unlike say a play station you can't just go to a store and buy a game without connecting your device to another system.
The disk with your playstation game is pressed as a copy of a master disk that was created by a computer. In contrast, an iPad is connected via radio waves to a transmitter that is connected via cables to computers.
The only difference is the transport medium used for the computer-computer connection.
At least on Android Tablets there's also nothing really stopping me from buying a USB-stick with games and installing them, without any computers involved after the stick's creation (I would have to get a friend to create it and sell it to me, but the lack of market demand, and thus supply, is besides the point).
That might be possible on an Android tablet, though I haven't tested. Skip initial Google account setup, enable sideloading in the settings, plug a SD card (or an USB drive, if that's supported), use the built-in file manager to open the APK.
Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts.
Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters?
Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility.
Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket.
Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching.
These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.