Tablet PCs – Can They Live Up To The Hype?

The hype behind tablet computers can barely be escaped, with at least one of the major mobile network operators or electronic manufacturers releasing tablet related announcements every week. Meanwhile, sales of tablet PCS are booming with over 950,000 sold in the UK alone in the last quarter of 2011.

The International Data Corporation predicts this trend is set to continue with up to 124.8 million shipments of tablets forecast for the whole of 2014. Whilst a large proportion of these will almost certainly be used in a corporate environment, there is huge scope for their use by the general public for leisure, ecommerce and retail banking.

Are these trendy new gadgets really worth their salt though? Can they ever replace the need for laptops and desktops?

Whilst the last sentiment is certainly a little strong, there has been an explosion of available tablet PCs in the UK over the past few years. Whilst Apple’s iPad still dominates the market share, Blackberry’s PlayBook 2.0 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 are fighting the Android tablet corner.

In terms of price, for 16GB, Apple’s latest iPad retails at £399. This is identical to the Galaxy 10.1 although the budget Playbook 2.0 is around £200 cheaper.

Of course internal memory should certainly not be the deciding factor. The iPad has features such as Retina display, the Apple A5X chip with quad-core processing, a 5 megapixel camera, HD 1080p video recording and voice recording. Whilst its 4G capabilities will be largely useless in the UK until next year, the iPad dominates the majority of its cheaper rivals. Even the Galaxy Tabs only have dual-core processing.

In terms of retailing, ecommerce web developers have been optimising their company’s sites for mobile devices for some time now. Tablet specific functionality allows users to rotate, zoom and select all with the stroke of a finger; something that was previously impossible on laptops and desktops.

On the other side of the coin, the lack of hardware associated with tablet PCs is something that fundamentally undermines their appeal for some people. Word processing, for example, can be extremely tricky on a tablet PC without the use of an external Bluetooth keyboard. This, obviously, adds cost and reduces portability.

Moreover, the storage in even a budget laptop is some ten times larger than that of a tablet PC. The performance of a tablet PC for gaming and graphical design also falls far behind that of a laptop or desktop.

In conclusion, whilst tablet PCs are certainly improving it seems unlikely that they will ever be able to completely remove the need for laptops or indeed desktop PCs. As business leaders and ecommerce website developers have realised, however, tablets certainly aren’t just gimmicks and the growth in their popularity seems set to continue for at least the next few years.