Comment Re:Ya no kidding (Score 1) 243
I do continue to use my laptop when it is convenient. Circumstances include at home, at school when I have a place to sit, when I am out of the house staying at another location. It's a Chromebook but fills my needs just fine. It is fine for accessing computers remotely via TeamViewer's web client or SSH, I can take notes on it via Evernote (also on my phone and tablet) and I can write up and open letters, papers and emails just fine with Google Docs.
My smartphone (which I got before my old Dell laptop died) has a similar function. I have Evernote on it as well and have taken notes on it at various lectures and demonstrations when the laptop would not have been practical due to a lack of seating. I use a gesture keyboard (Swype for a long time, SwiftKey Flow more recently) and can type adequately fast to keep up with a lecture with no real fatigue. It also has TeamViewer and an SSH client so remote control in a pinch is not impossible but not ideal. Still that's better than nothing.
Most recently, I received a Nexus 7 as a gift and it fulfills the same roles in slightly different situations. I can use the tablet instead of the smartphone during lectures (should I have it with me), and it has the same remote control software I mentioned previously which is far easier to use on the tablet versus the smartphone. It does help me to save battery on my smartphone by duplicating some of the functions that drain the smartphone's rather meager battery. So I can keep the tablet on and read, play music, video or (yes) the odd game while my smartphone sleeps and does only tasks that require the internet. I've noticed a significant increase in the useful life of my phone throughout the day since I started using the tablet. My co-workers and I use our tablets at work (we're the very small IT department of a shopping network) as portable computers for note-taking, network testing, filling out equipment inventories, reference/manual look-ups and other tasks.
Tablets really do have a place in an increasingly paperless world and I feel they will continue to persist as internet connections become more ubiquitous. Laptops are already being subsumed into tablets and soon enough we may only have tablets and phones and simply dock them to provide displays and link peripherals when a better interface is required.
I think that the niche tablets fill is not something that everyone has, but it is there and it needs filling.