AMD UK Retail Business Development Manager Andrew Muscat told T3 that tablets are desirable gadgets, but they have certain limitations which preclude them from being used as productivity devices. He pointed out that hybrid tablets could address this shortcoming with relative ease.

“You’re going to see a shift I think, while tablets are good you’re still restricted when it comes to content creation, there’s always going to be a need for notebooks,” he said. “I think it’s moving a lot more towards taking tablet technology and effectively turning it into notebook technology.”

Muscat pointed to a couple of trends that might speed up the transition. The increasing shift to cloud services should help push productivity on all devices, while new CPUs will allow hardware manufacturers to come up with clever solutions, harnessing the cloud rather than relying on brute force CPU usage.

Although some may say that AMD is just being bitter about its lack of success in the tablet market, it should be noted that five years ago AMD said netbooks were just a fad and that they’ll be relegated to the dustbin of hardware history. The prediction was spot on, although we’re not entirely sure about tablets. Hybrids just aren’t an option for small form factors and we doubt we’ll see many sub 10-inch designs.