[Zigurd]

The tablet market is not like the phone market. In many ways, it will be easier for Android to gain market share, since the channel isn't controlled by carriers in some markets. Any OEM can enter this business, and many many will.

Tablets are the post PC device, and the skip-the-PC device.

Tablets will be the inexpensive personal internet access device for Asian markets that now rely on internet cafes. Apple will take only the luxury market here, but will make plenty of money at that.

Tablets will displace PCs from the desks and especially the non-desk-bound workers in enterprises who can't justify the support costs of a PC. Apple will be a stronger contender here because of their long head start, but Android has some technical advantages as well as cost and choice of OEMs.

One thing that's missing is software that takes advantage of tablet power and screen real estate. My prediction is that this will happen first in enterprise software where budgets will support more ambitious software development, and that it's possible it will happen on Android first because it's easier to make a suite of cooperating apps for Android.

[laureny]

> Tablets are the post PC device, and the skip-the-PC device.

It really depends what people mean by "post".

If it's post as in "will replace", then it's nonsense: laptops and desktops are going to be around for a very long time.

If it's "will complement the laptop/desktop market", then I completely agree.

[smtddr]

Nah, the only people who actually need a laptop/desktop instead of a tablet+bluetoothKeyboard are people who need a lot more power than tablets can provide today. So that's digital artists, developers with their VMware/VirtualBox/etc and servers. I look to my non-techie dad(though he use to do those punch-card stuff) as an example; got him an iPad and the only thing he misses from his previous laptops is the keyboard.

I'm very interested in what other people think about this. Does the general public need anything more than a high-end tablet + bluetooth keyboard? Or maybe, just because some people enjoy a big screen, a tablet with a docking-station providing the keyboard, mouse and big screen?(which is basically a PC, I guess). Some of my coworkers predict a day where smartphones are so powerful, that you'll just put them in a docking-station at work and it'll be just as powerful as a high-end notebook today.

Today's consumer laptops/desktop are like Adobe Flash. They're both dead and the tech to replace them exists, we just haven't completely agreed on how to go about it - but they are both definitely dead.

[dualogy]

> the only people who actually need a laptop/desktop instead of a tablet+bluetoothKeyboard are people who need a lot more power than tablets can provide today

So anyone developing mobile apps then ;)

[smtddr]

Yeah, exac- ..wait, http://i.imgur.com/j74SykU.gif

[Zigurd]

AIDE keeps getting better. There are some things, like GUI-builders, that are devilishly hard to do in a cross-development environment. There is nothing fundamental blocking native development on Android.

[ChuckMcM]

That is the relevant question. (What does Post-PC mean?)

Looking back at the PC 'revolution' we see that initially computers were in the office and not so much at home. And if they were at home there was only 1 and generally shared.

But what PC's did was create a place you could deliver an application (the PC provided input/output/storage) for the marginal cost of the software bits (which is quite small). So a tremendous number of companies sprang up to deliver those applications since the rate of return is quite high.

As PC's migrated home, they did so primarily as an application vehicle and less so as a tool. This is markedly different than most of the readership of this site (which uses computers as tools) but it is far and away the largest use for computers in the home and individually owned computers.

The programability came at a price however, it made compatibility challenging (bad mojo to have your app not work on your customers machine) and it enabled a threat to undesired programming (viruses, worms, etc) running on it.

For the biggest chunk of the market, the customer's ideal device has no programmability capability outside an application's need for configuration, no way for any application to interfere with another application, and rock solid compatibility. Sort of the 'game console' equivalent of information appliance.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all gunning for that space (and apparently so is Valve :-). Apple's approach is an appliance OS (iOS) and a developer OS (MacOS), Google's approach is an appliance OS (ChromeOS) and developer tools (Chrome, AppEngine, Etc.), Microsoft has the developer OS (Windows) with what might be called the third attempt at an appliance version (Windows RT) (previously Windows CE and Windows Embedded).

If these efforts mature the way their respective owners would like, the bulk of the "computers" out there will be information/data appliances running their appliance environment. Computers will go back to something nerds, scientists. and engineers use and "regular" people ignore.

[x0054]

"Cooperating apps" is the key here, I think. I think it's idiotic that iPad is yet to have some semblance of an operating system.

[x0054]

Ops! Typing on an iPhone, tried to edit and hit send by accident :) I meant file system, which is key for any kind of real work on device. For instance, on an Android I can save a PDF file in say Work folder, then open it in one app to annotated it, in other to perhaps rotate some pages and rearrange content, and finally compress along with other files into a single zip and email it out.

In theory, I could do the same on an iPad, but it would be a really convoluted string of passing that file from app to app, as appose of have that file in one place and using different apps as tools, to work on that file.

With all the hard work apple is doing trying to make OSX users think that their hard drive starts at the ~/ folder, I don't expect full system excess here, just a Document folder and a Finder.app to manage it.