An unnecessary tablet

Perhaps it's just jealousy. It could very well just be a bit of spite for the high price. But whatever the underlying reason, I don't want a tablet. Or more accurately, I don't want to pay for a tablet.

Much like you supposedly need an ANC membership card to get to heaven, perhaps I need a tablet, more specifically an iPad, to “see the light”.

Kathryn McConnachie, journalist, ITWeb

Yes sure, I would probably be delighted if I was handed one for free (who wouldn't be?), but other than that, I remain mildly interested by the devices - although not nearly interested enough to break the bank to get one.

When Apple introduced the iPad, for many it was simply a nice looking unnecessary device. However, surely not all of the more than 15 million people who have bought iPads since the device's breakthrough in 2010 thought the device was “unnecessary”.

Writer Gus Silber sums up the phenomenon nicely: "The genius of Apple is that they create entirely new markets for consumer technology by introducing devices that you didn't know you needed until you lay your hands on them."

Much like you supposedly need an ANC membership card to get to heaven, perhaps I need a tablet, more specifically an iPad, to “see the light”.

There is no doubt that the iPad has done what tablet PCs failed dismally to do in the past. Also, it was plain to see at last month's Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, that the competition was scrambling simply to catch up to Apple in the tablet market, let alone provide any groundbreaking new features.

When given the chance to play around with some of the new offerings, I found myself thinking again and again, yes it's very nice, but none of them offer anything that I can't already do on my other devices.

In a way it's comforting to tell oneself: “No, I don't need that - the devices I own are just fine for my needs.” But it's admittedly hard to be repeating that mantra when you're lugging your laptop around all day, and waiting for programs to load and boot up while the person next to you is already five paragraphs into their note-taking, recording audio and tweeting, all on their tablet computer, which fits neatly in their hands.

Tablet owners, and iPad owners especially, do exude a certain aura of 'cool' that makes the green-eyed monster rear its ugly head for those of us who aren't part of the tablet club. And never before has 'coolness' played such a strong role in the success of a device.

Competitors have tried and not quite succeeded as yet when it comes to rivalling the appeal of the Apple devices. One analyst said: "They lack magic, they lack sexiness, they lack the essential and inherent 'I want' quality of the iPad."

As the local Apple distributor, Core Group has said the appeal of the iPad lies in the capacity it offers for customisation: through the App Store everyone can find applications to suit their lifestyle.

But as I have been finding since purchasing my MacBook, one often ends up feeling coerced into a tightly controlled Apple eco-system - and a very pricey, albeit good-looking, eco-system at that. While some may say this is where the strength of the Android devices lies, what about that elusive 'cool' factor?

At the end of the day, tablets in their current form are complementary devices. They lack the full functionality of PCs, laptops and smartphones. While they keep getting lighter and faster, they are yet to be properly integrated into the computing environment and a USB port would be a great start in that regard.

iPad 2 features are the same, or at least similar to those that competitors have been trying to use to differentiate themselves from Apple, with cameras, HDMI ports and fast processors.

Amusingly, Samsung has even been caught out for fibbing about the specs of its new Galaxy Tab 10.1 - supposedly thinner than the iPad 2, but in reality not quite. It was also discovered that the supposed “happy customers” featured in a promotional video for the new tablet device were actually paid actors.

So, while companies continue to battle it out for a place in the market (with apparent increasingly desperate measures), I will patiently wait for the competition to start bringing down prices and pushing better functionality.

I have no doubt that if I were to get a tablet device that it would change the way I compute and I will marvel at how I ever survived without one (in the same way I feel about my smartphone). But until tablets are priced in such a way that will make them fully accessible to the mainstream market and fully functional in my computing environment, I will remain blissfully ignorant of its benefits, and hold thumbs for a free hand-out.