Tablets don't have the capacity to kill off PC and laptops due to their limited capabilities, which will see them gain a maximum 30 per cent share of the computer hardware market, Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and technological entrepreneur, told Computing.
Bushnell, dubbed "father of the modern video games industry", was speaking to Computing following his keynote speech at Campus Party Europe, the week-long festival of technology at London's O2 arena.
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"I think tablets are actually quite limited because so much of what you want to do actually needs a keyboard," Bushnell said.
"And if you say that a tablet is a screen you can attach a keyboard to, but they're all pretty crappy keyboards. I believe that the PC and the laptop are so far from dead as for the idea to be ludicrous," he added.
However, Bushnell is a fan of tablet computers, and promotes the use of them in education through his BrainRush project, a subject he discussed during his earlier keynote presentation.
He reiterated that point, telling Computing that the touchscreen nature of tablets makes them a useful tool for children in the earliest stages of education.
"I do believe that for the first three or four years of school, tablets are very, very important for young kids, because a touch screen is intuitive, it's great for certain kinds of things," he said, adding that he also enjoys using a tablet for reading.
"I love my Kindle. I don't buy paper books any more, I just don't do it," Bushnell continued, going on to say the interactive nature of tablets means they make some things easier.
Nonetheless, Bushnell told Computing that tablets are unlikely to surpass PCs, which are still needed for the vast majority of applications.
"I think that the tablet market will never exceed 30 per cent of the PC market," he said.
Research by Computing also suggests that the PC is far from dead. A survey asked 187 IT professionals across all sectors what type of device they're most likely to select when refreshing their IT estate. Seventy per cent of respondents chose desktop or laptop computers. Just two per cent said their next purchase would be a tablet computer.
