Toshiba perceives that the rapid growth of tablet computers is nothing but a fad that people would soon get over with. The company is even visionary about its future devices for mobile computing. Mark Whittard, Toshiba’s managing director in Australia, commented about tablets in sync with the comments given by Thorsten Heins, the CEO of BlackBerry. Both the experts predict that the future death of tablets is about to happen. Whittard believes that tablets will slowly be off-market, while notebooks and smartphones are going to stay there for now. He thinks that tablets have a short life though it is now the booming time for them.
According to Whittard, tablets will face a future similar to pocket PCs and MP3 players. But, it does not mean a discontinuation of tablet making by his company. In fact, Toshiba is launching the Protégé Z10T, which is a hybrid PC that has an 11.6-inch touch-screen tablet and a keyboard dock that can be detached. The company has also launched a new Windows 8 tablet. There would also be some other new Android devices ready soon. Whittard also told that the company will keep its focus on tablets for now as the market is in a booming now, but the reality demands engineers and research and development scientists to remain prepared for the future and think about further evolutions too. That is what can make a company lead at the forefront.
Even if both Toshiba and BlackBerry agree to a dim future for tablets, both are planning on different future strategies. While Toshiba plans to focus more on notebooks and smartphones, BlackBerry would go for developing a single device to support various digital functions. This device could be of a size similar to that of a BlackBerry Z10 smartphone. While launching Z10, Heins commented that a smartphone could change the user’s perspective if it becomes a single computing power.
Now, some geeks react in opposition to what Toshiba and BlackBerry have to say about tablets. They feel that the companies are claiming this tablet future as they have not been able to deliver good-quality tablets and have displayed a poor performance in the tablet market. On one hand, Toshiba has not been able to face competition from Samsung and Asus; and on the other hand, BlackBerry has built tablets like PlayBook that remained a complete failure. But, nobody knows as yet about the future devices as people use varied-sized devices for different purposes and combining them into one would not be an easy task.
