Monday
Apr302012
Question: Luxury tablets?
Monday, April 30, 2012 at 3:00AM Are tablets luxury items in your opinion or necessities? I would rate them as luxuries in some ways and the iPad is the first device I would lose if I had to drop one.
Reader Comments (8)
Luxury item in my opinion, these days I mainly use my Xoom to keep my four year old son quiet.. He loves Field Runners... I did take it into work in the past for notes in meetings, but these days I use my Galaxy note (still with a small bluetooth keyboard)..
I use my tablet a lot, and it's a very helpful study tool. But it's definitely a luxury.
I quite like my iPad and use it for all of my reading among other things, but yes, it's a luxury.
I'm curious to see who will say "necessity" and why, because obviously the tablet is a luxury item.
Phone is a necessity (for communications), computers also (for general work), but tablets are not necessary. They are very nice and good to have, that's true, but not essential.
@ Rui - it comes down to your perception of needs and wants. Lets face it Maslow hierarchy of needs makes most of gadgets really become more of a want. You don't need a smart phone to communicate there are other options to communicate those technically even a phone could be considered a want rather than a necessity? One could consider all wanted items a luxury as they aren't a necessity.
Having stated the above and while I do proscribe to the basis of it and thus would consider it a luxury to a degree.
However in todays current environment I don't really consider our tablet a true luxury and the reason I don't is because we don't just use it for playing games, occupying ourselves, entertaining the children watching videos etc (in which case it could be condsidered a true luxury as it is more about luxury time and there are alternative options that are actually better suited) however it also is our main form of communication with family etc outside the country - it has become our computer of choice (the desktop is used for my work and for photo & video editing/storage etc), and because it has become a mainstay item more that just a casual item i tend to consider it a non-luxury item.
I understand your point Jaam. But society has put an enormous weight on a phone as the main communication device. Let's face it: remove phones from a society and the society would have to change itself accordingly. Remove computers and everything would have to change. Remove tablets... and... well... everything would not need to change - see what I mean?
Of course I can see what you say... it's a very comfortable device that seems just right between the phone and the laptop. But it's not critical. Thus it's a luxury.
"however it also is our main form of communication with family etc outside the country" - not main. You have phones and voip phones. For all the rest we have computers.
Just before Apple released the iPad, was the world so much different?
In my opinion, a luxury item is something that if you didn't have it didn't make a difference. To me a tablet is just that. Hey... I have one too. I use it constantly, but admit that if I didn't, I would just read or play a little less.
I completely agree with Rui. Personally I'd love a tablet and I would get one in an instant if I could afford it. I would be completely sold if it could replace my netbook for my everyday work tasks without jumping through hoops, in other words if it could serve as a light weight PC (and I specified my netbook since it's fairly portable and not a full fledged powerful PC).
Luxury at the moment. But as they improve they could replace computers properly.