Smartphone vs Ereader vs Tablet vs Laptop

Buy an ereader if you want the best long-run reading experience. Reading from an E Ink Pearl display is as nice as reading from a physical book. Reading from the other devices is as good as reading from a computer monitor (fair).

Buy a tablet for the best web browsing experience. With their light weight form factor and their touch screens, tablets excel at web browsing. Laptops are good but not as handy as tablets. Smart phones do ok on the web but their small screens are a serious liability. Ereaders based on E Ink technology are lousy at web browsing because they tend to have slow, black-and-white-only displays. (Note that LCD-based ereaders such as the Nook Color tend to be more like tablets with excellent web browsing.)

Buy a laptop to run the most applications and games. Laptops have the deepest and richest set of applications due to their powerful processors and their long history of supporting software built for desktop computers. Tablets and smartphones are catching up. Developers seeking to capitalize on the strong growth of mobile platforms are enthusiastically introducing new and innovative applications on tablets and smartphones. Ereaders, on the other hand, are limited in the apps area. Their processors are typically underpowered relative to the other portable computing devices, and their E Ink screens are very slow to update.

Buy a smartphone for portability. A device left behind because of size and/or weight cannot be used, so there's great value in high portability. After cell phones, ereaders are nicely portable. Most are several times lighter than tablets such as the iPad. A 5-inch or 6-inch ereader fits in most purses; a 10.7-inch tablet tends to be too large and heavy for a purse but fits well in a bookbag. Laptops, once considered to be highly portable, now are relatively hard to haul around.

Buy an ereader for the best battery life. Portable computing devices' battery life depends heavily upon its screen type and size. E Ink displays (such as are used in ereaders) consume electricity only when changing the display (e.g. turning a page); LCD displays (such as are used in smart phones, tablets, and laptops) consume power constantly while on.

Buy a tablet or laptop if you want to use the device for viewing photos and videos. The form factor of a tablet is ideal for viewing and sharing photos and videos. A smartphone can display photos and videos, but its display is really small for the task. An E Ink ereader cannot show the color in photos and cannot show video at all due to E Ink's slow refresh rate.

Buy a smartphone or tablet if you want the device to be capable of capturing digital photos and video. Resembling a camera in size and portability, and smartphone is a good stand-in for a real camera. A tablet can capture at decent resolutions and speeds too, but its size makes it unwieldy for the task. A laptop has no more than a front-facing camera (used for video chat). E Ink ereaders do not come with a camera.