Tablet World.pdf

FEATURE Which tablet is right for you?
Which tablet is right for you?
2012 saw the launch of three iPads, Windows RT tablets, and the rise of
mini tablets. The result: a market that’s now more confusing than ever
6 TABLETWORLD
Here’s a fun game. Ask the person next to you when the iPad was first
announced. Then watch them look surprised when you reveal that
Apple’s iconic tablet was first launched as late as 2010.
Tablet computing has been around for a long time, of course. PDAs were
popular in the 1990s, and Microsoft was heavily pushing tablets at the start of that
decade. But until the iPad changed everything, tablets occupied only a tiny niche of
the wider personal computing market. The tablet boom has grown from next to
nothing to its current staggering pitch in just two-and-a-bit years.
Following the never-to-be-surpassed success of the iPad, tech hardware
manufacturers rushed to capture a slice of the pie with what turned out to be
inferior devices. Throughout most of 2010 and 2011 the iPad had no rivals that
could match its combination of high-end software and good-looking, stable and
seamlessly integrated platform.
Android tablets were hobbled with, in essence, an outsized smartphone
operating system, and the best ones cost the same or more than the iPad anyway.
Windows tablets were heavy, shrink-wrapped laptops with poor battery life and
a desktop OS. BlackBerry managed to launch a great tablet in the PlayBook, just
as smartphone users were turning their back on BlackBerry phones, and with
barely an app worthy of the name to make the PlayBook useful or fun.
As of the end of 2011, there was only one answer to the question
‘what tablet should I buy?’. The iPad.
“At the end
of 2011, there
was only one
answer to
the question
‘which tablet
should I buy?’”