BY MOMAN KHAN

Tablets were originally created to fill the void between the smartphone and the laptop. As of now, it is impossible to tell if filling that void was even necessary; but now the industry has something that’s a little more personal than a laptop but also a little more spacious than a smartphone and just a lot of fun to use. The whole tablet industry took off and the ipad was obviously a huge part and it’s gained a spike in popularity pretty quickly. A lot of people could say it was just a bigger iphone and in a lot of ways it really was but that was fine and people seem to really love the iphone.Now fast forward to today. We’ve seen an evolution in all three categories and with that  kind of coverage our smartphone do more and more in 2010 the industry standards for your big smartphone was the 4.3 inch display all the big smartphones have the 4.3 inch display today that’s literally considered compact by a lot of standards so smartphone are getting bigger as they are capable of doing more. Laptops are also in a bit of a transaction period.

There are still plenty of bigger laptops but now we also are starting to see laptops that are nearly as thin and light as tablets which has began to blur the line between the two.

Tablets also evolved in the past couple of years and continue to get better and better and the best tablets yet have come out recently so you might not think so but on the other hand if you look on paper, tablets are dying based by the volume of tablets purchased over the last few years. The numbers have actually started declining, and in fact, the entire tablet industry is down 24 million tablets shipped each quarter for 2014 and then again in 2015 with only 16 million tablets shipped. Plenty of research has gone into trying to figure out why tablet sales are down so low and it’s sort of still a new category so there’s no definitive answer. There is the obvious fact that smartphones are becoming larger while laptops are becoming smaller pushing them into lower category.

Looking at the different realms inside the electronic industry, tablets still do a ton with the stronger side of hardware now than before. Tablets have more optimized apps with better dedicated accessories that allow gaming on them, surfing on the web, taking pictures on them. Performance is great, battery life is great, tablets could not be better but the total user base of these tablets has hit its peak. Discovery was great with that initial spike of the ipad and all the huge competition in the first year or two was awesome and then it just sort of leveled off.

There are two hypothetical reasons as to why that may be. One is people upgrade their smartphones quite often; meaning people upgrade every 12 to 18 months. One’s tablet is not upgraded every one or two years because all casual stuff users do like  gaming and web browsing doesn’t need a new model every two years resulting in one kind of tablet just sitting around.

In consideration of that fact, smartphones are always coming out with new and improved features, some cooler than others which would be another reason for the decrease in tablet sales. One could argue that there’s been a genuine lack of any super exciting crazy new features in tablets in the past couple of years. Sure tablets have kind of pushed up against what laptop are doing and tried to do more and stay as friendly as a smartphone but in the end tablets are always stuck in the middle with a sort of niche that they will only ever be  an in between item.  In relative perspective, tablets are not dying but are just more focused on being that middle ground.Tablets, indefinitely, turns out are not for everyone only for the pocket of users with dedicated smaller groups, or for the parent who wants to buy their kid not a smartphone but still something to keep them entertained, or even the casual gamer who wants a bigger screen but doesn’t want to carry a laptop around or a graphic designer who wants a specific stylist designing experience. Stuff like that proves tablets are not dying but are still in the discovery stage of themselves.