Vaio, a former partner of Sony, has recently unveiled a personal computer/tablet with a very large screen. The "monster tablet" does not have an official name as yet, but has a 12.3-inch high resolution 2,560 x 1,704 (3:2) screen as well as a wireless keyboard and an electric pen. This prototype is the first created without any influence from Sony.
The "monster tablet" is designed for illustrators, photographers, and all kinds of creative professionals. It is definitely for the high-end market with a very high price tag of $1,825. General manager Yoshifumi Ito says that it is a tablet environment as powerful as a desktop and "we want to free up creators from the desk when at work". Other specs of the product include an Intel Haswell quad-core CPU with Iris graphics.
That $1,825 price point might be very high for the average consumer. Considering that the tablet market is more designed for content reading than content creating, it is interesting to see Vaio go in this direction. The "monster tablet" will be available in May of 2015, and plans only to sell in Japan. Vaio still intends to sell its laptops, but most of these models are simply carry-overs from when the company was partnered with Sony.
Vaio intends to compete with Panasonic, who also makes some very high-end products. Panasonic has a good reputation for creating laptops that are light, durable, and a long-lasting battery. Considering that Panasonic is a brand name that is very popular in the United States, it is not known whether or not Vaio intends to brings its products stateside.
The existence of this "monster tablet" might reveal a shift from a laptop and desktop computer markets to a pure tablet market. The shift from a strict laptop-oriented product base into a product based on tablets will change how users interact with content. While tablets are really designed for reading content, a tablet where a user could comfortably create all kinds of content ranging from video to any kind of programming make working on a computer very portable.
In other words, developers won't have to set at their desktops or laptops to create content for a tablet. Now they can simply create them from the tablet itself. Granted, developers always had that ability, but with the Vaio monster tablet, it will make it easier, especially with the electronic pen and wireless keyboard. This is clearly the type of portable market that Microsoft has been targeting with their only mildly successful Surface.
