Despite the promising future in which tablets or “tablets” appeared since 2010 as portable devices with large screens that allow watching movies and videos, they unfortunately disappointed and did not succeed in attracting the target audience, and Apple alone continued to occupy the throne of tablets for many years With iPads, most other companies stopped producing them and focused on making smart phones, which is a guaranteed profit.
But Xiaomi decided to break into this field, especially after the success achieved by Apple from iPads, to unveil the first competing tablet in the market called “Xiaomi Mi Pad 5”, which comes with a great similarity – even in name – to iPads, so will Xiaomi succeed? In sweeping the tablet market, will this be the beginning of Android’s success in this platform?
Reasons why tablets fail
The reason for the emergence of the tablet in the beginning was the dream of being the golden mean between laptops and smartphones; Unfortunately, many factors combined that led to the failure of this idea for Android systems, including:
Poor software support, Google does not like tablets!
The software giant considers Google the basis for the success or failure of any new idea. If you pay attention to a technology, it has improved it and made it better over the years. But if you look away, that technology will most likely die; But the opposite happened with tablets, where Google was initially interested in supporting this area, and this appeared in its unveiling of a dedicated version of Android to support the experience of tablets under the name “honeycomb”, which did not really work and was the only failure in the history of Android systems.
To this day, Google has not customized Android systems to run on tablets, and this may be the biggest reason for the failure of Android tablets, as manufacturers such as Samsung are forced to modify the system manually to adapt to large screens, without that in the Android kernel.
Of course, we are not talking about applications, as Google allows developers to support tablets in the “Android Studio” platform, but rather about customizing the system itself for easy navigation between applications and taking advantage of those huge screens to create an easier use experience.
The emergence and spread of the phablet
The phablet appeared in the market for the first time in 2011, and it is considered a mixture between smartphones and tablets. It is a smartphone with a rather large screen size ranging from 5.5 inches to 7 inches, and this screen is rather large and achieves good vision purposes against a screen Old smart devices that were no more than four inches in size.
What made the phablet special is that it does not take up much space due to its size, as in tablets whose screen size exceeds 7 inches, this was a wonderful combination between two completely different categories, which also helped in its popularity with modern technology that made the designs of phones without edges, which gives a greater centering of space screen without having to inflate the entire device, any phone you buy today, is often a phablet!
Read also: It’s the time of similar shapes.. Has creativity died in smartphone design
Why does Apple alone control the tablet market?
There are many reasons that have come together to make Apple successful in promoting its tablets, and despite the decline of tablets running other operating systems such as Android, the iPad remains very popular, here are some of the reasons we think are the reason for that.
iPad is completely different from iPhones
Apple has succeeded in developing an operating system dedicated to iPads called iPadOS that has features that make it different from iPhone devices, as the iPad operating system is dedicated to improving the experience of using large screens, something that we do not find in Android systems, and it also supports the use of a trackpad and keyboard In addition to mouse support, Apple is touting it as an excellent alternative to laptops, another point of strength for the iPad.
iPadOS also supports the ability to open multiple windows, and do multiple tasks at the same time, of course, this is not something new for Android users, but to show how Apple creates a distinctive experience for using iPads, iPhones even today do not come with this feature.
The ability to draw or write using the light pen, in addition to other additional accessories
If the Xiaomi tablet has to compete with the iPad, the device producers should look at this point very carefully, as Apple is distinguished by providing a lot of additions to its tablets, perhaps the most prominent of which is the light pen, which is considered one of the most useful tools for the user, as it comes quickly in response Directly without any delay, which makes it just like a regular pen, and the more hard you press, the drawing line becomes thicker, and the operating system of the iPad supports writing in search using the light pen, so you don’t need to switch to using the keyboard when searching on the Internet.