I've realized recently that I'm just not very excited about tablets—anybody's tablets, no matter the OS or maker. I first realized I felt this way when I was only mildly disappointed (as opposed to heartbroken) to find myself too sick to attend the long-awaited (by me, anyway) webOS tablet unveiling. Since then, I've thought a lot about the roots of my tablet ennui, and I've narrowed it down to a few reasons.

My hands are in the way

A Google Image search turns up the above, quite typical picture of a scribe practicing his art. You'll notice that the scribe's desk contains two levels, where the topmost level holds an exemplar document and the bottom holds the document that he's actually working on. The scribe in the picture could be a copyist who's making a copy of the exemplar, or he could be a writer who's using the top copy as a source or reference. Either way, his basic work setup is the same as my modern monitor plus keyboard setup, in that it's vertically split into two planes, with the top plane being used for display and the bottom plane being used for input.

The key here is that the scribe's hands aren't in the way of his display, and neither are mine when I work at my desktop or laptop. My hands rest on a keyboard, comfortably out of sight and out of mind.

With a tablet, in contrast, my rather large hands end up covering some portion of the display as I try to manipulate it. In general, it's less optimal to have an output area that also doubles as an input area. This is why the mouse and keyboard will be with us for decades hence—because they let you keep your hands away from what you're trying to focus on.

My ultimate point here, and the reason I started with an image of a scribe, is that this separation of our productive workspace into display and input planes has been with us since the dawn of writing, and is likely to stay with us as long as being productive involves making text and pictures. It's a fundamental reality of knowledge work, and it means that multitouch tablets will continue to be novelty/entertainment items.

No tactile feedback

When I use a tablet, I feel like I'm manipulating the interface through a glass barrier... because, of course, I am. This lack of real tactile feedback into my fingertips frustrates a set of natural expectations about working with one's hands that we hairless apes have been endowed with by millennia of evolution.

I may get over this particular quibble, eventually. My two-year-old certainly doesn't seem to have an issue with it. But ultimately, I hope that this is a problem that technology will one day solve. Maybe a future, nanotechnology version of Gorilla Glass will do the trick.

I use the best gear for the job, and a tablet isn't the best at anything

Here's a list of things I either do or expect to do on a tablet:

Watch video

Read books and papers

Surf the web

Listen to music

Play games

Light productivity (email, document editing, calculators)

Social networking

I'm sure I could add a few things to the list if I thought longer, but the tablet isn't really the best gadget that I have for any of the above—at least in terms of the overall experience (cost and convenience aside). For watching video, my TV wins. I prefer to read books and papers on either the Kindle or as dead-tree color printouts and books. Surfing the Web is easier on a computer, especially if you leave a lot of tabs open. I've yet to have a tablet gaming experience that really surpasses a good console or PC game. And so on.

What the tablet is valuable for is for letting me easily cram a downsized version of all of those experiences and functions into a single, lightweight, compact, long-battery-life gadget. So it's great for traveling light. But if I'm at home it's just not the richest or most productive way for me to do anything that I do.

In fact, even when I'm traveling, I don't bring the iPad if I plan to be productive. I find most apps to be a waste of time—often they're incredibly fun and fascinating wastes of time, but they're still time wasters. And even the productivity apps that I love, like scientific and/or financial calculators and things like OmniFocus, have desktop counterparts that I'm faster with.

I can summarize this point by saying that a tablet doesn't really empower or inspire me to make anything that I couldn't make in an easier or better way with another tool; and when it comes to viewing, listening, reading, and surfing, I have better gear for those experiences, as well. So a new tablet will never be exciting the way that a new, luxury gel ink pen will be exciting, or a new leather journal, or a new HDTV, or a new digital camera, or a new game console, and so on.

"New media" is an infinite supply of CD-ROMs

Despite my natural cynicism, I held out some hope that the tablet could provide a truly exciting platform for creating new, rich media experiences that could replace the glossy magazine. Instead, what all magazine publishers produced (Condé Nast included) was a bloated, multitouch-enabled version of the exact same "new media" experience that used to ship on a CD-ROM under the name "multimedia." Seriously, I had a copy of Microsoft Encarta way back in the day, and I'm not seeing how any of the magazine content on the iPad radically improves on that. Indeed, in the case of Wired, an issue is still about 700MB, or about the size of a CD-ROM.

Some of the really savvy new media efforts like Flipboard are exciting, but after the initial "wow" factor wears off, these apps mainly serve to remind me that there's already too much good stuff to read out there, and that my life is slipping away from me in an infinite stream of interesting bits about smart animals, dumb criminals, outrageous celebs, shiny objects, funny memes, scientific discoveries, economic developments, etc.. I invariably end up closing the app in a fit of guilt, and picking up one of the truly fantastic dead tree or Kindle books that I'm working my way through at the moment, so that I can actually exercise my brain (as opposed to simply wearing it out).

The #2 pencil

Don't get me wrong: I'll always have a tablet in my life, just like I'll always have pencils, pens, a laptop, a phone, a camera, etc. But until someone comes up with a tablet that can do something unique and special that nothing else in my life can do better—as opposed to a slightly truncated, more portable, or cheaper version of something I'm already doing with another tool—I'm probably over being truly excited about the new ones that come along.

(Note, however, that I put something like Microsoft Surface 2.0 in a different category from a tablet. The Surface screen is large enough that you can separate display and input regions. Plus, the fact that it can "see" and recognize what you put on its surface adds a whole new range of input options that bring it well beyond mere multitouch.)

So while I look forward to more tablets from Apple, Google, RIM, HP, and the rest of the tablet class of 2011, I'm just not jazzed about any of them. Because in the end, a tablet is really just a modestly sized screen, and there's only so much you can do with a modestly sized screen, regardless of how many fingers you can use on it at once.

Forever alone painting on iPad by lysgaard