Unless you have been living on Mars these last few years, you will know that the technology news to watch in the coming months is the competition between ever more impressive smartphones, and the lightning growth of the tablet market, fueled especially by the near breathtaking success of the Apple iPad. Apple, however, will probably not control these markets for long.
At first, it looked like the only real news in the smartphone market would be the competition between the Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone. But it seems that the Apple product has emerged as the clear victor in this initial skirmish, and Blackberry is scramblin
g to recover. Nokia’s future is also in some doubt, but they are an innovative company and nobody is ignoring them.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the idea of detaching the screen from a laptop and making it self-sufficient launched an entirely new mobile industry. Although the Apple iPad quickly emerged as the front runner, other companies are scrambling to catch up. Furthermore, the impressive success of e-readers such as Sony’s e-reader, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes and Nobles’ Nook. In fact, it is widely held in the publishing industry that Barnes and Noble’s early gamble on their own e-reader, the “Nook”, may well have been the main reason that Barnes and Noble saw the demise of their competitor Borders, who failed to enter the digital reading market quickly enough. Digital publishing represents one of the few bright spots in the otherwise declining figures of the publishing industry, and tablets are set to take advantage of this in ways that smartphones simply cannot. Let’s examine some of the other aspects of this competition between smartphones and tablets.
Smartphones have the advantage of size and convenience – and the ease of communication. They are a phone, after all, and although you can certainly use communication services like SKYPE with a tablet – the tablet must have a camera, and people must be used to communicating this way. Phones have the advantage, for now, for this kind of communication.
Where tablets have the clear advantage is gaming and correspondence. Let’s face it – typing with your thumbs is a necessity that is not particularly enjoyable – which is why phone messages have developed a code for minimizing the amount of typing you must do. Tablets allow you to fully express yourself, and engage in correspondence with the full range of the English language! And graphics and gaming? Sorry, smartphones, tablets have you beat completely here! And movies and TV on smartphones? Whose crazy idea was that, anyway? Once again, tablets offer the superior experience.
So, who is going to win? Frankly, we all already know the answer to this: we want both!! Smartphones and tablets will soon be the necessary requirements for modern life… at least for the foreseeable future. But then again, who saw either one of these pieces of equipment coming?
