Phones got bigger and better. We got better at thumb typing and comfortable holding screens close. Reading on a tablet for example, is not that different to a phone these days and a (cheap) dedicated reader is better still. Meanwhile, laptops kept getting more mobile. The space between my phone and my laptop is just not that big. I found that I only ever charged it before flights, for movies which is great on tablets. But even that.. laptops and phones work good too.
Otherwise, my tablets were often battery-dead and I most tablets i come across in friends living rooms are dead. They don't get much use. When a laptop or phone died, I need a new one tomorrow. The tablet... no urgency.
Tablets are fun and cool. People like them. I'm not sure they use them as much as they expected to. It's a less extreme version of smart watches. Fun. Likeable. Not essential for most people.
The problem is that the android and iOS monoliths (especially sofwarists) will always put the phones first. If we had a less centralised ecosystem, tablets would have their own specialists.
It’s a matter of personal taste, I guess.
Serious question. I think I do about 99% of my communication via text or other messaging
But one thing that annoys me is that people don’t usually realize how much faster and clearer voice conversation can be.
After 4 or 5 rapid text exchanges I usually send “can I call you?”
Of course it is, but tablet sales have been declining for years.
Source: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43549518
I like to think that tablet sales are reaching their stable values rahpther than just declining.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/269915/global-apple-ipad...
I, too, do ssh + tmux, as well as Textastic, Pythonista, and Working Copy (git), so much so that when I showed a colleague what I did, he exclaimed in an astonished tone that the only things he thought people used iPads for were email, browsing, and games.
That remark prompted me to make an 11 minute video (all done on the iPad using screen recording, Keynote, and iMovie) of creating a Linode, sshing into it, installing a user with SSH login, logging out and sshing in as the new user, installing the latest Docker from docker.com, and demoing some of the apps I just mentioned (to fit a 15 minute time budget). The latest iPads are not toys; they can be used for professional work.
With LTE access, I can easily work almost anywhere; working on a plane is much easier than with a laptop (for me - I'm pretty tall and it's already a squeeze).
That's why (I think) they will get less investment, like this article.
Unless Google start setting audio latency requirements, it's a lost cause.
If Google had sorted out the audio story earlier, you might still have had problems with commodity tablets, but it might have been worth somebody's while to make a tablet specifically for audio and midi. It wouldn't be a million miles away from Maschine or something like that. But I fear the opportunity's gone now, and Android tablets are just a write off.
I still have my Nexus 7 which I basically use as a Kindle.
Otherwise only Samsung devices are usable, with their own real time audio SDK.
Why do you say older versions of Android had better support for tablets?
Android, I think, is not even supposed to be a well-engineered system. It is not central to its purpose. Its purpose is to eat marketshare, collect data, and ensure there is an outlet for ads. It only has to work well enough to do those things :)
I get the sense that it was all slapped together as quickly as possible.
Sadly it is hard to win over free beer.
It was, historically. Android was a startup that had to get to market as fast as they could. To make matters worse, once the iPhone came out they had to quickly switch from a Treo-like interface to a iOS-like one in order to stay relevant.
To Google's credit, they've been trying for years to clean it up, but there's only so much they can do…
Our app has a great tablet version, on par with iPad and we don’t use fragments at all. We just change things based on size.
It’s more that Google obviously stopped caring about tablets many major versions ago.
Once the civil war between him and Pichai had a clear winner (after all, for a while both ChromeOS and Android were poised to push into the same market), the tablet elements were depreciated rapidly as as Duarte was free to assert more control.
The thing that annoyed me the most about Nexus 7 apart from lacking on basic things was its sound... I'd go in an airplane and I wouldn't be able to hear anything. After that I never bought a Nexus product again, and tbh I don't feel left out of anything.
Was the sound issue also present when you were using headphones?
A bit of topic: Because it inconsiderate to use speakers in a airplane. Last airline I used warn passengers to not use speakers.
Strictly speaking, Android tablets never even competed in the same arena as the iPad. Samsung is an exception, but they don’t control the ecosystem — which makes things much harder for them — even if we ignore their atrocious software.