A little over a year ago, people saw on the market new portable devices dedicated to reading books and the news. The Kindle stirred up the reading media market. Soon, Sony and altogether new brands joined the market for reading devices.
Apple was still going strong with their advances in iPod technologies — the iPod rubbing backs with the iPhone. Essentially, by January of 2009, the iPod Touch was an iPhone without the phone. So the Touch and iPhone were capable of joining the e-book reading and mobile news selection of devices. There are more than 140,000 apps in Apple’s App Store to date. You can do practically anything with the devices that a laptop can achieve; maybe not as well, but you can do practically anything with these devices.
But this is not enough for the geniuses and diligent minds at Apple. They, along with many other brands at this year’s CES, introduced the device that fills the void between the suped-up phones and the small-powered laptops. We now have tablets, as they call them, coming to stores in the near future. These devices promise to browse the internet better than laptop and desktop computers! Tablets want to revamp the way we read everything! Tablets want to become powerful players in gaming and professional applications. It’s no longer good enough to have the desktop in your home office, at your office at your place of full-time employment, the laptop you use at the coffee shop, and the mobile phone you use everywhere else in between. You need the tablet that’s sits on your nightstand. You will integrate the tablet into your leisurely reading habits. You will take it on longs trips for the kids to play games on. You will get word documents and presentations created with it wherever you may find yourself! You will have the internet everywhere you go on this netbook killing machine.
Soon I will have a post to discuss what this really means for readers and writers. I think everyone needs to gird themselves for another fast-paced learning curve, and we artists, writers, and culture-makers cannot afford to be left behind. Even if you never own a tablet, it will change your culture. Even if you don’t want to keep up, you will need to or will be left behind while people replace you with the developments in the market overhauls. It’s time to re-strategize.
