Tablets

Got a 10" Android tablet for testing & developing stuff. It's surprisingly nice. I can hold it at a distance to read and watch videos. It's got LTE, so I can do calls with it, and taking and looking at photos is much nicer than on tiny phone screens. It's lightweight too. My parents have an iPad Pro 12", which is even better for videos, but starts resembling a miniature TV in use due to the size and weight (and the iPad is so much smoother at basic interactions, thx properly engineered UI & render loop).

Tablets (and perhaps laptops as well) are a strange device category. In most things, they're inferior to phones: the cameras are second-rate, the screens aren't as sharp, they're heavier, few apps are optimized for the tablet form factor, and in Android-land, they usually ship with old OS versions and have less powerful HW than the flagship phones. But in some ways, I feel like this 10" tablet is a superior phone. It's got a big screen. There's a stylus. The battery lasts longer. It's a lot more comfortable for many phone tasks compared to a 5" screen: more messages, more emails, more text, bigger images.

Why not make a tablet that is a superior phone in every way? Aim for the same battery life as flagship phones when in heavy use (1-2 days). Double the cores and GPU, 4K HDR display, quad camera module, double front-facing cams, stylus, lots of fast storage, lots of fast RAM. Lightweight build. Imagine bolting two flagship phones together, that kind of thing.

You could pretty easily make a device that's got 2x the perf of top shelf x86 laptops since you don't have to pay the x86 tax (x86 chips are 5-10x more expensive per transistor compared to Snapdragon 835 for example).

Pair it off with a smaller device (3" superwatch?) that can handle the mobile tasks (calls, messaging on the move, quick snapshots), and delegate reading, watching and creating to the tablet. 

All you'd really have to do is fork Android / iOS to turn it into good computer operating system.

So yeah, the problem I have is that the current mobiles are too big and heavy, and the current tablets are not good mobiles (or good laptops for that matter). 

Flip flopo flipo flop scrollophone fanphone foldophone umbrellaphone AR glasses.