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Is the tablet destined to be a TV companion device?

by Scott Bicheno on 13 June 2011, 11:52

Tags: Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)

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Getting to the point

Dell announced last week that it would be launching its ten inch tablet exclusively in China at first. One of the reasons given was to give Android developers in the US time to make apps that make the product worth buying.

In an interview with Cnet at around the same time, a Dell exec revealed that he thinks the US Android tablet market is immature and there is confusion about what the point of an Android tablet is. What was unsaid was that Android tablet OEMs are struggling to give consumers a compelling reason to buy their products over Apple's iPad, which has a much more coherent proposition.

Apple has much less of a presence in the Chinese market and, according to Dell, the consumer is much more savvy, which is a bit counter-intuitive. A subsequent piece derived from the same interview also features insight from an analyst, who thinks US consumers need more education on the difference between tablets and PCs, and thus not to buy on specs as they do PCs.

But what is the difference between a tablet and a PC? Initially it was thought that portability was a big factor, but research shows that tablets are used predominantly in the home. The real appeal of tablets is ease of use. They have the touch-screen and intuitive interface of a smartphone, but much more screen real estate. Meanwhile they have the ‘instant on' feature that notebooks lack, and are just generally a bit newer and cooler - not having the ‘productivity device' label notebooks are encumbered with.

Tablets sit exactly in between the smartphone and the notebook, but merely filling a form-factor gap is not enough of a reason for most consumers to buy one. Tablets need to have a point - a compelling use-case - and I'm increasingly of the belief that it will be as a living room second screen, and more specifically as a TV companion device.

We've seen from the relative failure of initiatives such as Google TV and Apple's tentative approach that bringing the Internet to the TV itself is a difficult business. This isn't a technical problem, it's a user experience one. When we slump in front of the telly most of us just want to mong-out - pic a piece of content and stare at it - as we unwind, or forget our problems, or whatever.

Yes, we like choice, but we want the process of finding what we're going to stare at for the next hour or two to be quick and conclusive. Ideally our TV would just pick the perfect programme to suit our taste and mood, but that's something clever algorithms may never be capable of doing. Once that choice is made, and we're sitting comfortably with whatever paraphernalia completes the experience for us, then we might think about talking or surfing the net, but only then.

So, as I gathered from the panel discussion on digital content I attended last week, we're up for indulging in interactive behaviour while we're watching TV, just not with the TV itself, which is where the second screen comes in. Right now a large proportion of Twitter traffic is people spewing their stream of consciousness thoughts about whatever they're watching on TV, predominantly sent from smartphones.

But I can see tablets replacing the smartphone in this case. Not only is it easier to type on a tablet, the greater real estate opens up the possibility of managing several social streams at once, or even streaming some other content at the same time. We're already getting apps designed specifically to help people interact with some TV shows - especially those that require things like voting - and a ten inch screen allows a lot more interaction.

In fact, social TV is a big growing trend in the tech world right now. From a commercial point of view it opens up new ways for broadcasters to interact with - and ultimately profit from - its audience, such as charging for voting, market research, viral marketing, etc. Many social TV apps are designed for smartphones, but as the tablet install-base grows and developers people are using them predominantly in front of the TV, the potential of the tablets larger screen will be exploited.

Sky has announced that, from next month, its customers will be able to access all their Sky channels via their PCs and iOS devices via a new service called Sky Go, so this increasing symbiosis between the TV and mobile devices works both ways. As the tablet searches for a raison d'etre, the answer looks increasingly tied to solving the puzzle that is Internet TV.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 14 Comments

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Does anyone do a tablet that allows multiple user accounts? I haven't found one so far - which leads me to assume that the current tablets are really designed to fit in-between smartphones and netbook/laptops, really being nothing more than bigger screen versions of the smartphones.

I'd kind of hoped that someone would have looked at that “Joggler” thing that O2 used to do and targetted something at that market. Tablets (at the moment) are too expensive to have one per family member, so a shared one makes more sense to me. Trouble is that they're single-user devices!

Getting back to the article, think ScottB has got it right - you can access the web easily enough on smartphones, and office stuff is better on a netbook. Which means that video consumption is the major deal for tablets, (unless you can't deal with scrolling around the screen on a phone - in which case I guess web browsing is also a use).
I use my tablet for web browsing (the extra screen real estate (as compared to my 3.2" Magic) is invaluable), as an ereader, for casual gaming, and for streaming internet radio. I'll also use it as a music player while I'm browsing or reading, if I feel like it. Despite my protestations to the contrary, I've actually found myself very rarely using it for productivity: in fact I use my HTPC for productivity more than my tablet.

Now, that may in part be a failing of the hardware, which is quite slow and difficult to set up and work at even with a USB keyboard; it may be in part a failing of the software, as there isn't really a mature office suite for Android at the minute; it may in part be a failing of the form factor as a whole. Most likely it's a combination of all of those things. I'm not completely ready to write off the tablet as a productivity tool, but it's got some way to go yet.

As to tablets with multiple user accounts: that depends on what you call tablets! The Acer Iconia W500 is a tablet form factor but runs full fat Windows 7, so you can have as many user accounts as you want on it. But I suspect you weren't really talking about tablets with the x86 architecture. It's another blur of the line though…
scaryjim
As to tablets with multiple user accounts: that depends on what you call tablets! The Acer Iconia W500 is a tablet form factor but runs full fat Windows 7, so you can have as many user accounts as you want on it. But I suspect you weren't really talking about tablets with the x86 architecture. It's another blur of the line though…
I'm cheap - any tablet that costs more than a decent laptop is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. But you're correct - folks are so busy being dazzled by the iPad that they forget that there's some x86 gear out there too.
crossy
I'm cheap - any tablet that costs more than a decent laptop is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.

Couldn't agree more. I spent £90 on mine. It does more than half of what I'd do with a laptop, so I reckon I got a decent deal :D
Apple has much less of a presence in the Chinese market and, according to Dell, the consumer is much more savvy, which is a bit counter-intuitive.
Not necessarily. One way of interpreting that is that they are more price-conscious and perhaps less influenced by a Western-oriented fashion-icon price premium.

Tablets sit exactly in between the smartphone and the notebook, but merely filling a form-factor gap is not enough of a reason for most consumers to buy one. Tablets need to have a point - a compelling use-case - and I'm increasingly of the belief that it will be as a living room second screen, and more specifically as a TV companion device.
They sit in that gap in term of form-factor, but I'd argue it's more than that.

Any of these devices have to either fulfil a need, even if we don't know we have a need, or create one to be a success. And smart-phones and tablets never were, in my opinion, going to be a viable substitutes for each other, though there is an element of cross-over, not least from people that already have smart-phones. But a tablet is never going to have the single biggest feature of a mobile phone, smart or otherwise, which is the compact size making it a very plausible device to easily carry about. The whole point of such devices is carryability, and communication away from home. Because of their size, tablets are inherently going to be of very limited use in that context. Their benefit, therefore, is ease of use, screen size and how that translates into meeting that need for the consumer, in a much more geographically constrained location. That is, you might use a tablet in the home, or in the pub, or conceivably even in a train or plane, but it's never going to be a popular device for holding to you eyes or ears while wandering down the high street, or casually answering or putting on the table while trying to pick up a girl in a nightclub.

I'd agree it's an ideal device for the type of TV interaction described, but I'd also argue it's going to have to be a hell of a lot more than that for most people to get them to fork out £300-£500 for one, let alone the premium of iPads. The instant-on (or nearly so) is one important aspect, but so is net access, forum browsing, email-checking, social networking etc, while sitting at the kitchen table, lounging on the sofa, laying in bed, relaxing in the summer sun at a table in the garden with a cocktail, or for the braver among us, taking a bath. A tablet is large enough to be a comfortable experience doing that rather than trying to either do it on a poncy little smartphone screen, of lugging a laptop around.

It's all about the user experience, in my view, IF tablets are to take off. I think they will, but it's still a pretty immature market, and they are still devices with what looks to me to be very much an early-adopter price premium.

After all, laptops (by which I include the evolution from luggable notebooks to netbooks) took about 20 years to go from the extremely expensive, mainly business-oriented niche products to the ubiquitous and modestly-priced products we've had for the last few years. Anyone looking at laptops in the days when five grand was relatively cheap would never have predicted that they'd become so cheap, and commonplace, let alone, for many people, a desktop substitute.

I think it's too early to pigeon-hole tablets. After all, what we do with mobile phones, and the price of them, bears no real resemblance to the first decade or so of their existence, and who'd have predicted texting for the hit it was, much less twitter?