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A comment on Global, U.S. Growth in Smartphone Growth Starts to Decline. Parent comment

Re:Global, U.S. Growth in Smartphone Growth Starts to Decline by api on Saturday December 08, 2018 @12:27PM (#18636306)
Tablets are in an uncanny valley. Phones fit in your pocket and are good for communication, brief transactional interaction with services, and casual stuff. When I want more than that I want a real computer, which means I pull out a laptop. Laptops are only a little bigger than tablets. Tablets have the crippled by design OS of a phone but none of the portability.

There is a market for tablets but I see it as somewhat niche.

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Re:Global, U.S. Growth in Smartphone Growth Starts to Decline by freehunter on Saturday December 08, 2018 @12:41PM (#18636376)
Personally for me, phablets are an uncanny valley. I had an iPhone Plus for a while and it never clicked. It was too big to use with one hand, but the screen size didn't warrant using two hands like an iPad does. I switched to a smaller phone and just use a tablet when I need a big screen.

Real work gets done on a laptop, but there's a lot of space between "phone" and "real work". I do wish I could get an iPad Pro with a mouse and the ability to run VSCode though...

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Re:Global, U.S. Growth in Smartphone Growth Starts to Decline by dredmorbius on Saturday December 08, 2018 @08:52PM (#18638750)
There's nothing but app ecosystem standing between Tablet aand useful flyweight mobile computer.

Getting Termux on Android was a complete game-changer, and took the device from hated useless toy to ... well, still-hated, but occasionally useful toy. But clearly the limitation is in apps and OS, not form-factor.

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Re:Global, U.S. Growth in Smartphone Growth Starts to Decline by api on Saturday December 08, 2018 @10:18PM (#18639042)
That's what I said -- "dripped by design" OS. That being said I don't see it as something that's going to change. The duopoly behind phones and tablets wants these devices locked down. In Apple's case it's so they can take 30% of every transaction. In Google's case it's so the device can double as a surveillance platform.
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Re:Global, U.S. Growth in Smartphone Growth Starts to Decline by dredmorbius on Sunday December 09, 2018 @02:06AM (#18639775)
I'm watching Purism and Ubuntu with interest.
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