Stefan Mileschin

Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins blew a huge raspberry at the future of tablets, again.

Many would have expected Heins to be laying low with his opinions considering his strategy of pinning every hope on a much delayed Blackberry 10 appears to be floundering.

Heins wanted to say a few things about the future of tablets at the Milken Institute Conference in Los Angeles.

He claimed that in five years there will not be a reason to have a tablet. While you might want a big screen in your workspace, it will not be a tablet. Tablets themselves are not a good business model, he said.

Earlier this year Heins made a similar claim, while also boasting Blackberry will undoubtedly be at the top of its market in the near future.

Current views are that the PC will be replaced by mobile phones and tablets. A recent forecast from Gartner expects the tablet market to more than double by 2017. That's a growth from 116.1 million units shipped last year, to 197.2 million this year, and 468 million units projected to ship in 2017.

But Heins is talking about the business market, which he thinks will still be dominated by smartphones. While tablets are increasingly used in the workplace, the platform is not overtaking PCs and large display monitors.

Roger Kay, principal analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates, told Red Orbit that tablets will still be around in five years.

However, he was expecting to see a proliferation of form factors to emerge in more finely targeted markets. That means an increase in specialisation will increase, with tablets possibly becoming a larger category with a number of sub-categories like hybrids and others, at varying cost..

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