Are Tablets the Smartphone Killer?

Gadget Lab editor Dylan Tweney is posing the question: What is the perfect phone to tether an iPad?

Like me, Tweney is an iPhone and iPad owner, and we’ve been having this discussion offline for months, like Vladimir and Estragon, with about the same results. He’s tired of waiting — hence the attempt to crowdsource an answer on the off-chance we haven’t thought of something.

But the fact that this power user of  … everything is having issues in his connected life in what has to be the golden age of gadgets and digital tech strikes me as extraordinary.

To be fair, this is something of a convoluted problem exacerbated by the business models of Apple and AT&T, which conspire to require users of iOS devices to pay separately for connectivity on each device. No multidevice discounts. No tethering without an upcharge or without hacking your iPhone in a way that voids your warranty and still isn’t for the technologically meek.

But this very new dilemma begs the question: Are we at the dawn of an age in which tablets will become the jewel in your gadget crown, eclipsing the mighty smartphone only a few years into its reign?

There are a couple of truisms at play here. Our brains get wired bit by bit — you couldn’t possibly understand a fax machine without first knowing what a telephone is. And, every advancement creates the conditions for revealing or introducing new problems.

We know, for example, that Apple worked on a tablet first but shelved it to make the iPhone. The iPhone was revolutionary in many ways, but it was not paradigmatic — there were other feature and smartphones already out there. There were also plenty of stabs at tablets, none of which caught the world’s imagination.

But look at what happened. The iPhone greased the skids for the iPad, which came three years later. One of the pitches for the iPad was “you already know how it works.” One of the criticisms was that it was just a bigger iPhone — or rather iPod, since it is not a mobile phone. And now Apple has re-introduced the MacBook Air, the most moribund device in their portable line that suddenly makes more sense (especially the 11-inch model) as something very much like an iPad, with the “missing” keyboard.

And having both an iPhone and an iPad has exposed the shortcomings of what was once called “the Jesus Phone.”