Can Tablets Outpace the Competition?

With phones getting larger and tablets largely available, do we really need PCs? I’ve tried using tablets and phones instead of PCs, and I’ve thought about this a lot, and in my honest opinion, no.

A main factor of this is size: if you look at the size of a desktop/laptop computer, it’s obvious that they are much bigger than tables/phablets. This is due to the size of things like GPUs and hard drives. Tablets would have to get a lot thicker, and larger in order to provide a standard of graphics that would be considered acceptable. The same could be said for hard drives and internal storage. Most PCs have at least 500 GB of space now, compared to 64/128, which most PC users would not consider enough.

Another issue is battery life. While laptops have large batteries, desktop computers are plugged into mains electricity, meaning that they never have to be charged. A phone or tablet can be kept on charge while you use it, but it makes it less portable, which defeats the point of such a device.

Another setback is keyboards and mice. While LG just announced their ‘rolly’ keyboard, which works with any Bluetooth 3.0+ device, but still doesn’t offer the normal amount of keys you’d expect to see on most full sized keyboards, you are very unlikely to find a good mouse for an android/apple tablet, if at all. This, for most people, is a fundamental feature of a PC, and not going for the full features is just not a compromise, I’m afraid.

Operating systems are also a big restricting factor: as much as apple and Microsoft are trying to keep all of their OSs for different platforms in sync, the tablet/phone Operating Systems just don’t cut it for most PC users. The features of a PC’s OS are usually much wider, also due to RAM and CPU power.

Another thing that sets a PC apart from mobile devices is multitasking; windows lets you drag a tab to either side of the screen for 2-way split screen, but you can also drag and resize as many windows as you want to fit your screen – a feature which is invaluable to users like myself, who write and research at the same time as listening to music and messaging others! Even if multitasking is still doable on mobile devices, it is much more convenient on a PC.

Laptop companies are even getting the right idea by making their computers have touchscreens – giving users the option of 2 different input methods natively. The same goes with trackpads and pointing sticks – for two different mouse methods.

All in all, unless people give up their trendy, precious, thin phones, or we see a revolution in the size of storage and processing units, I very much doubt that handheld portables will overtake PCs and Laptops, at least for the foreseeable future.