So, why are tablets so small?

[andrewducker]

Watching Family Guy in bed with Julie this morning I realised that a 10"
tablet is too small for comfortable bed-watching of TV. My laptop screen
is 15", and that's pretty much perfect. But nobody makes tablets that
large. Any idea why not?

In other news, the Google Doodle on http://www.google.pl/ is awesome.
Robots FTW.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I wonder what a tablet's relationship to average hand size is.

[thejeopardymaze]

I suspect it's partly because like with ereaders, it's infant technology, and perhaps more easily breakable than the average laptop until the inevitable improvements are made.

There is also the matter of how to make developers happy, the 10 inch is popular because of a set screen size, which is why apps used on 7 inch tablets might have more problems being rendered/displayed. I'm sure it will change in the next few years, of course.

[pseudomonas]

It's a Cyberiad doodle! (and if you've not read the Cyberiad, read it now)

[andrewducker]

I have, and it's awesome!

[andrewducker]

Oh, the Doodle is for Stanislaw Lem, whose work I recommend. The Cyberiad is one of my favourite books.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I love Stanislaw Lem - haven't read them for YEARS....

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for large tablets, there's an article here. 65 inches is the current record.

[fub.livejournal.com]

If you want to watch TV in bed, why not put a TV in the bedroom?

[andrewducker]

It'd be another device to buy, which would need cables for power, hooking up to the network, something to allow it to stream video from the NAS, a remote control to use, would need to be big enough to watch from across the room, we'd have to drill holes in the wall to hang it from and would then mean that if we rearranged the room again (as we tend to do every year or so) we'd need to move the cabling and drill new holes.

Whereas we're perfectly happy with a laptop on my lap that we can watch together. A TV seems like a lot more effort.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Whereas we're perfectly happy with a laptop on my lap that we can watch together.

There's your answer.

An iPad (9.7") or similar is fine for solo viewing, but what you're looking for is a device that can be positioned a bit further away so that both of you can see the screen without one of you getting a 45-90 degree off-centre viewing angle.

However, the two-or-more-people-using-it-simultaneously case is [still] a lot rarer with tablets; tablet OSs are designed with an implicit single-user assumption in mind. And I suspect it's always going to be a much smaller market.

(A 15" tablet will invariably cost more to fabricate than a 9.7" or 10.1" tablet, simply due to the size of the screen. And the one use for such a device that you've highlighted is "TV substitute". I reckon most people who need a two person TV viewing machine will go for the TV -- unless and until a new computing niche emerges that requires 15" and multitouch. Which I don't see, because the obvious apps -- CAD and layout -- really want something much bigger than 15".)

[andrewducker]

I guess what I want is a very light, low power, high battery life, 15" laptop.

And I can have the first three with something like the Asus Transformer, and the latter with a standard laptop. It's just a shame that nothing falls between.

(The Modbook looks neat, but is also rather more than the current system I have).

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Then you're waiting for the 15" Macbook Air that is allegedly coming early next year, if the Usual Industry Sources™ are right about the major Macbook Pro line-wide refresh that's coming.

[andrewducker]

You're probably right. Sadly I doubt I want to pay for one. Hmmmm.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

From a manufacturing perspective the screen is the most expensive component. To make a 15 inch tablet they'd have to charge the consumers so much that there would not be enough of a market for it.

[andrewducker]

My laptop has a 15" screen. It was about £400. Are touch-screens _that_ much more expensive to make?

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Apparently, yes. The chief editor of Gizmodo was on CNN last week talking about the Kindle Fire and when asked why Amazon didn't make the screen the same size as the iPad he explained that due to the manufacturing costs of the touch screen adding that extra two inches would have resulted in the Fire costing $400 more at the retail level than it does now.

He went into a lot of technical detail as to why, but honestly, I didn't understand what he was saying.

[andrewducker]

Ok, that makes sense. I'll have to do some reading about it.

I know resistive screens (the ones that use styluses) aren't so bad, because I've used larger resistive screens on tablets. But capacitive ones (which you can use with your finger) must still be. Shame.

[star-tourmaline.livejournal.com]

Is it very bad that my response to this was 'because we have to swallow them'?

[andrewducker]

Do not swallow beds. This would not be good for you.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

That was my thought too when I saw the twitter post!

[simont]

A 15" tablet might be nice to sit and hold, but considerably more annoying when you come to pick it up and carry it around somewhere. Something the size of an iPad strikes a reasonable balance between a screen big enough to be useful and a device small enough to shove in a rucksack or whatever.

[andrewducker]

I carry my laptop with me when I go away for trips, and I'm basically looking for a replacement for that. An iPad is too small for me to replace the laptop with, so I'd be left with two devices, which would just be too extravagant for my current expenses :->

[simont]

Fair enough. OTOH, from my point of view, an iPad is something I can carry easily in the bag I was almost certainly taking with me anyway, whereas a laptop or laptop-sized item (if I had one) would be something large enough that I'd have to use an extra bag or a different bag for it. So my guess is that tablet makers' market research says there are more mes than yous, IYSWIM.

[andrewducker]

Yes, but I can buy a laptop from 11" to 17". I'm curious as to why nobody has pushed tablets up to that size. You'd think someone would try it.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

+1. Carry my iPad everywhere, hardly use my laptop. Tablets are personal items and I often watch TV on mine - I just bring it closer. Laptop is cumbersome and I'd never take it to bed. If I wanted to share something I'd plug my iPad through the TV. Roy has a 15" double touchscreen on his Iconia - that was a £1500 laptop so I suspect a single tablet at that size would be about £1000 and probably a limited user base as too big to lug around every day. Tablets are by virtue small and compact.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I agree. Here I am, the opposite of Andy, refusing to get an iPad because they're too big for my tastes. I got started with Origami tablets in '06, and now anything bigger than 7" seems clunky... but that's because I use my tablet on the road, and the difference between a 7" and a 10" there is the difference between carrying it on my hip and carrying it in a briefcase.

-- Steve really doesn't think there's much of a market for 2-person tablets... and given today's state of the market, it'd probably be cheaper to get two tablets and use software to synch their output over wi-fi.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

How about an Axiotron Modbook? It's a tablet that's a true laptop substitute.

Of course, you might not be its niche market (which is primarily design folks who need to run Photoshop on the road in front of clients) ...

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

I don't quite understand this post.
The selection of capabilities to combine, and the sizes and interfaces of the packages they go into, may be the most turbulent area in "computing" today.
The forms you are talking about are only several seasons old, and evolving at breakneck speed. Heck, for $100 you can get a nice big flat screen to plug your player into and that's less than about any tablet, and so what if it has to plug into the wall and into your tablet or whatever?.

Bookmark this to review it next Christmas' shopping season, for perspective.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure what it is you're not understanding.

There's a market segment I'm interested in. I am wondering why nobody has entered said market segment. I assume there is a reason, and I would like to know what it is.

It's possible that the problem is that capacitive screens are just too expensive at that size, but I've not managed to find any figures on that.

Why does me wanting to understand things confuse you?

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

In a month or three, it'll all be different anyway.

[broin.livejournal.com]

If you had a larger tablet, what would prop it against? You'd need some sort of stand. Like, I dunno, a keyboard? :p

Totally agree, though. Seriously considering a Transformer Prime for Xmas, for Velcroing to the kitchen cabinets, feeding music to bluetooth portable speakers, for reading RPG PDFs and taking them to cons, and lots of comics. I'd thought about getting a PC, but I'd really just use that for games. Which seems like expensive entertainment.

Also, they called it the Transformer Prime.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, this was kinda following on from my post a while back about liking the look of the Eee Transformer, because it's basically a lightweight laptop with oodles of battery life, that you can _also_ use as a decent comic-reader by unplugging the screen. I just realised that the laptop I wanted was one with a 15" screen, not a 12" screen.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Also at google.co.uk, in English. :D

[andrewducker]

Aaah, cool. Wasn't there first thing.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I saw someone link to google.co.uk, and manually loaded google.com -- which has an entirely different doodle. :D