1. antonio crawley's Avatar
    Blackberry CEO: Tablets are doomed!

    Jared Newman
    @onejarednewman Apr 30, 2013 7:24 AMprint
    Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins has made a bold prediction: He says that tablets don't have much of a future.

    �In five years I don�t think there�ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,� Heins told Bloomberg today. �Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.�

    Heins comments seem hard to believe at first. Tablet sales have been skyrocketing, as households phase out aging laptops and replace them with cheap media consumption devices. This trend shows no sign of slowing down.

    But a broader look at Heins' past remarks shows a vision that actually isn't so radical. Essentially, he believes that the smartphone will be the center of your computing universe, and provide the processing muscle and data for a vast array of smart displays.

    �You will not carry a laptop within three to five years,� Heins told the New York Times last November. �Instead, smartphones will power the PC workstations of the future, replacing laptops and desktops.

    Heins expanded on those remarks in an interview with ABC News in March: �This is not just a smartphone anymore,� he said. �This is your personal computing power. Think about what you can do with that. How many personal computing devices do you carry? Why not unify this to one device that executes all your computing needs?�

    ASUS
    The Asus Padfone: Part phone, part pad.
    Modular computing is hardly a new idea, but it's not ready for prime time. Asus already tried to combine phone, tablet and laptop together with the Padfone�a product that hasn't been a huge hit. Canonical is eyeing a converged future for Ubuntu Linux, but has trouble finding OEM support. Windows 8 hybrids, meanwhile, try to bridge the laptop and tablet device with varying degrees of success, but the phone is still completely separate.

    The concept won't really take off without major advances in wireless communication that would eliminate the need for a multitude of wires and complex docking stations, along with improvements in smartphone battery life. Software must also be designed around modular computing, so a single operating system can make sense on all screen sizes.

    Modular computing presents its own challenges as well. Other devices become worthless if your phone is lost, stolen, or simply placed in another room, and having everything tied to one device also means being locked into a single ecosystem.

    Will fixes to those problems rear their heads within five years, as Heins suggests? Perhaps. But no matter whether Heins is right or wrong about modular PCs, keep in mind that Blackberry hasn't ruled out making new tablets in the short-term.

    Just last month, Heins said the company is thinking about how to craft tablets in a way that adds value, and not just making hardware for hardware's sake�sage wisdom for any company that wants to live long enough to see the future of computing.
    04-30-13 11:20 AM
  2. Synerworks's Avatar
    For those that are still holding their breath for the Playbook 2 or Playbook 10" or whatever, what shade of blue do they need to be before realizing that the Playbook was a one off and we should just be pleased to be proud owners of a collectors item.
    tg1, brianatbb, Affie36 and 1 others like this.
    04-30-13 11:33 AM
  3. joshua_sx1's Avatar
    Blackberry CEO: Tablets are doomed!

    And so do we, the PlayBook users...
    04-30-13 11:38 AM
  4. FF22's Avatar
    And so in this "smart-phone rules all" of the future, we will all have Screens and keyboards in every room, basement, garage and backyard of our homes? Maybe. And while on vacation this larger free screen will be where? While I lounge in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower (hopefully, again someday) where will this larger screen be found and which of the thousands or even hundreds of other users find theirs?
    antonio crawley likes this.
    04-30-13 11:38 AM
  5. wimbly's Avatar
    In your pocket/bag I guess. A portable 7" or 10" thing which is just a screen and speakers combined that you plug your phone in to.

    Who knows whether Mr. 57 varieties is right.

    Personally I don't have a smartphone - just a basic pay as you go mobile and my playbook. That suits my personal circumstances better than having an expensive smartphone. But I do think I am in a minority here. It's hard to work out what will happen in the future. Maybe in (but, in much longer than five years I would guess) I will have a single smartphone and a few screens of varying sizes and portability about the place to connect it to. No tablet and desktop anymore.
    Tim1131 likes this.
    04-30-13 11:47 AM
  6. wimbly's Avatar
    Maybe you will even be able to fold up the portable 7/10" screens (with speakers).
    04-30-13 11:49 AM
  7. uncle_numpty's Avatar
    I have to agree that the tablet form factor won't be the ruling roost in 5 years.

    However, i think BBRY are totaly missing the point. Wearable compuing will be the way to go, either an over eye hud or dirct to eye projector like google's project eye glass wil be the next must have item.

    Personally, the transparent over eye hud is teh best bet imho.
    04-30-13 11:50 AM
  8. mmarco's Avatar
    One processor to rule all screens

    I like the ideia, but for now... BB10 on playbook would be great
    FF22 likes this.
    04-30-13 12:10 PM
  9. BB_Bmore's Avatar
    Dear Thor....please stop talking about your predictions fo the future...unless you have something Revolutionary To show on May 15th. P.s I wrot this from my qwertye phone Cconneced to myPLAYBOOK. I think there still are some glitches to work out
    04-30-13 12:40 PM
  10. sad_old_man's Avatar
    Well this is the report I read. Please note the comments regarding the sales of the ipad??????

    Did this muppet leave his last job of his own accord? Was he pushed? Or did he jump before he was pushed?

    http://http://mobile.theverge.com/20...business-model
    04-30-13 12:45 PM
  11. baruman's Avatar



    SEAWARRIOR likes this.
    04-30-13 12:47 PM
  12. baruman's Avatar
    I have to agree that the tablet form factor won't be the ruling roost in 5 years.

    However, i think BBRY are totaly missing the point. Wearable compuing will be the way to go, either an over eye hud or dirct to eye projector like google's project eye glass wil be the next must have item.

    Personally, the transparent over eye hud is teh best bet imho.
    Today, with the advent of movie and TV streaming, digital copies of movies etc, if I am at an airport or on a plane or in a hotel guess what is the perfect device to watch a a movie or TV show and/or send email or look at a word or excel document? Its a 7 inch or 10 inch tablet. At some point a phone is best at being a phone and a tablet is best at being a tablet. I am not watching a movie on a 4 inch screen. For them to be showing the same reticence that got us into this fix to begin with is mind boggling. You have X number of Beta devices. The minimun you should do is get the OS working on THOSE tablets and see if there is a market to go further. If there isnt, at minimun you have shown a good faith gesture tosome people who have been very very VERY loyal to you.
    uncle_numpty, brianatbb and BB12MX like this.
    04-30-13 12:55 PM
  13. sad_old_man's Avatar
    I have to agree that the tablet form factor won't be the ruling roost in 5 years.

    However, i think BBRY are totaly missing the point. Wearable compuing will be the way to go, either an over eye hud or dirct to eye projector like google's project eye glass wil be the next must have item.

    Personally, the transparent over eye hud is teh best bet imho.
    Right firstly I want some of whatever your drinking. I don't care what it is I want lots of it!!!!!!!

    "Wearable compuing will be the way to go, either an over eye hud or dirct to eye projector like google's project eye glass wil be the next must have item." My god that's strong stuff you're on!

    Unless at the moment you are about 12yrs old, the chances of you still being alive when that type of technology hits the retail stores at a price that people other than only the US President and the Pope can afford is cuckoo land!

    Let me switch my pb off and back on again to make sure the screen is displaying things correctly!!!!!!!
    Mickrick and merp23 like this.
    04-30-13 01:08 PM
  14. BerryClever's Avatar
    I have to agree that the tablet form factor won't be the ruling roost in 5 years.

    However, i think BBRY are totaly missing the point. Wearable compuing will be the way to go, either an over eye hud or dirct to eye projector like google's project eye glass wil be the next must have item.

    Personally, the transparent over eye hud is teh best bet imho.
    I don't know about wearable computing like Google's Glass will be the next must have. It, to me, is the same as Virtual Reality. It maybe a one day thing and it is advancing, but not for years and years and generations down the road. It is just not efficient. Even if they were able to make it look like regular glasses without the little box on the top right corner of the glasses, with the light and 10 second video recorder (which will be controversial at first)... you will still have to say what you want to do. To me it would be wierd walking down a busy and noisy street screaming "GOOGLE FIND ME AN ICE CREAM STORE!" (and you know their will be some "google find me porn" dudes out there in a big city) in hopes that it hears you over the crowds. I am sure Google would love to sell millions and millions of it and only hearing millions of people chanting "google" while walking down New York City... but I don't see it happening. When it can "read your mind", then OK, but even that technology is in its infancy.

    Some of these tech companies keep trying to go from step 1 to step 50 in one leap, but it doesn't work like that. 8 tracks to cassettes to CDs to MP3s. PCs to laptops to monochrome PDAs, to Newton, to touch screen phones/MP3 players, to tablets. They need to build, and the glasses and whatever Thor thinks is next will be here but not for a while. Right now make money off each step and work towards the next commercially profitable hit when it isn't a huge risk.

    As for phones being the one and only mobile computing device... well he is doing the opposite of taking steps forward or even leaping steps... he is standing still, and that isn't good either. Power is important, but screen real estate is important too. If anything laptops would be phased out by tablets. IMO at least.
    godsend85 and BB12MX like this.
    04-30-13 01:39 PM
  15. breakingpoint0's Avatar
    It's not that tablets will disappear. It's that tablets as we know them today will disappear. QNX will make this happen. It will happen very similar to Bridge: turn it on and most everything on your phone will show up on your tablet, eliminating the need to setup your accounts on more than one device. Expanding on that: the "tablet" of the future may have it's own guts, but the phone(at least a QNX phone) will be able to offload some of it's processing to the "tablet" via distributed processing(which, as far as I know, no other mobile OS has the architecture for). Imagine: the phone apps can run on the tablet and their processing is being done on the phone and the tablet apps are being processed on the tablet, while both being displayed at the same time. Check out this white paper on distributed processing if you're unsure what it is: An Introduction to QNX Transparent Distributed Processing

    I think with things like this the future will look very different for tablets and phone as we see it today. It's not going to just be view ports. Right now we have two distinct entities, a phone and a tablet. The future will be as if the two devices are one. If it was just a view port for a phone why not push a bunch of displays now, we can already connected via HDMI right? The PadPhone wasn't exactly selling like hotcakes(from what I have heard anyway) and that's what most people are envisioning. I postulate the future will be very different and BlackBerry has something cooking in their labs that's going to blow us away.
    Merboy6969 and eddy_berry like this.
    04-30-13 02:10 PM
  16. Mickrick's Avatar
    Blackberry CEO: Tablets are doomed!

    And so do we, the PlayBook users...
    "...so do we, the PlayBook users..." what? We agree? We're doomed? What?
    04-30-13 02:11 PM
  17. JeepBB's Avatar
    I tend to agree that this is the final nail in the coffin for any hopes of a future PB replacement.

    A while back Thor said "I've already got my guys designing the PB replacement...". (and then went on to say "but they have to convince me we can make money on it before we'll produce it"). All of the fans stopped listening after his first sentence and "Thor announces Playbook replacement... coming soon" posts were all over these forums.

    And now we have the "They'll be no tablet market in 5 years (sub-text: so there's no point in us making one)"

    On an unrelated topic, way back, some buddies of mine were experimenting with using a laser to draw a HUD directly onto the retina of a fighter pilot's eyes. Scary stuff... you've all no doubt seen ATMs with burn-in of multiple slightly offset screens?

    I guess it's proof of the old saying: if you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined-up!
    04-30-13 02:13 PM
  18. Mickrick's Avatar
    I have to agree that the tablet form factor won't be the ruling roost in 5 years.

    However, i think BBRY are totaly missing the point. Wearable compuing will be the way to go, either an over eye hud or dirct to eye projector like google's project eye glass wil be the next must have item.

    Personally, the transparent over eye hud is teh best bet imho.
    I can think of at least 10 good reasons why you're so wrong but I only need to state one - it would make the wearer look a right d1ck.
    sad_old_man and eddy_berry like this.
    04-30-13 02:16 PM
  19. JeepBB's Avatar
    I can think of at least 10 good reasons why you're so wrong but I only need to state one - it would make the wearer look a right d1ck.
    Heh-heh... which is why I also think phablets will never replace phones + (a separate) tablet.

    I really can't see young trendy types putting up with holding a phone with a huge screen to their heads. The first time they catch sight of themselves in a shop window will be the last time they ever use it as a phone.
    sad_old_man and angieberry10 like this.
    04-30-13 02:20 PM
  20. sad_old_man's Avatar
    Do you think anyone has bothered to mention thors future thoughts about the tablet being a non marketable product to the CEO of Apple? Or are we just going to let them go bankrupt selling thousands and thousands of ipads that they obviously won't be able to sell because our illustrious leader says they wont? Which they are doing? Which they will continue to do? Did I miss something in thors message to the world?
    taz323 likes this.
    04-30-13 02:27 PM
  21. jpash549's Avatar
    Possibly there is some confusion in thinking. A few years ago if you referred to a tablet you probably were referring to what we now call a laptop. Now we have touchscreen laptops which have permanently hinged displays with the computing and battery compartments in the keyboard section and also we have hybrid laptops in which the screen contains the computing, memory section and battery and can be separated from the keyboard which may also contain battery and other functions. There are certainly many ways to rearrange this type of gadget. With advances in processor capabilities and in solid state storage technology the smaller units are certainly becoming more powerful but maybe really significant improvements in battery size, power and recharging need to be made before really heavy duty work can be done. But most of the users probably don't do that kind of work. What did Thor mean? Maybe he was thinking in German and the translation didn't come out quite right. But he sure got a lot of publicity.
    sad_old_man likes this.
    04-30-13 02:32 PM
  22. dudoo's Avatar
    So to replace a tablet, you will have your phone connected to a bigger blue tooth Screen for the road and even bigger for the office?

    Posted via CB10
    04-30-13 02:34 PM
  23. SEAWARRIOR's Avatar
    if that asus padphone ran bb10 i'd be all over it,,, that's a sweet setup,,, i can see an incremental release of BB devices leading up to this,,, one by one, BB putting out devices that are "interconnectable",,, but then again, Thor has shown to be a bit delusional, too, lately...
    04-30-13 02:42 PM
  24. uncle_numpty's Avatar
    I can think of at least 10 good reasons why you're so wrong but I only need to state one - it would make the wearer look a right d1ck.
    See your guilty of assumption.

    Imagine wearing a pair of glasses and the virtual image is projected onto your glasses and appea rs to be projected to infinity and is equivaldnt to a 40inch display.

    Too anyone else yor just a person wearing bog standard transparent spectacles or sunglasses - not such a **** now methinks.

    I did a lot of work on this a few years ago for my job and it's totally possible, but expensive to get the optics to create the virtual image and to produce the optical coatings for the spectacle lens. Fitted on a combat helmet ok though
    04-30-13 03:01 PM
  25. sad_old_man's Avatar
    Possibly there is some confusion in thinking. A few years ago if you referred to a tablet you probably were referring to what we now call a laptop. Now we have touchscreen laptops which have permanently hinged displays with the computing and battery compartments in the keyboard section and also we have hybrid laptops in which the screen contains the computing, memory section and battery and can be separated from the keyboard which may also contain battery and other functions. There are certainly many ways to rearrange this type of gadget. With advances in processor capabilities and in solid state storage technology the smaller units are certainly becoming more powerful but maybe really significant improvements in battery size, power and recharging need to be made before really heavy duty work can be done. But most of the users probably don't do that kind of work. What did Thor mean? Maybe he was thinking in German and the translation didn't come out quite right. But he sure got a lot of publicity.
    There is a train of thought that says that ANY publicity is good publicity? I've never subscribed to that view personally but some do, mainly thespians and politicians both of which species are never to be trusted. It is not usual however for a so called business astute (I'm joking with that) CEO to flap his lips in the same way especially when talking about technology which I'm afraid he demonstrates his total lack of knowledge about everyone he opens his mouth, just to attract publicity!.
    04-30-13 03:08 PM
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