Are tablets the future of computing? Not according to BlackBerry chief Thorsten Heins.

In an interview(Opens in a new window) with Bloomberg at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles this week, Heins argued that within five years, “I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore.”

People might have a “big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such,” Heins told Bloomberg. “Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

Tablets certainly have not been a good business model for BlackBerry, at least. The company unveiled its PlayBook tablet in Sept. 2010, and it arrived in April 2011. But it was missing some key features – like native email – and was no match for Apple’s iPad, which had made its debut the year before. The PlayBook seemed half-baked, and BlackBerry was ultimately forced to slash prices, and took a $485 million hit related to lackluster sales of the tablet.

With the recent launch of BlackBerry 10, the company has stuck with smartphones.

Heins’s comments, meanwhile, come several weeks after analyst firm Gartner predicted that consumers will increasingly choose tablets over PCs in the coming years. The traditional PC market of desktops and laptops is expected to decline 7.6 percent to 315 million units in 2013, and continue dropping over the next four years as the tablet market grows. Worldwide tablet shipments are predicted to total 197 million units this year, a 69.8 percent increase from 2012 shipments of 116 million units, Gartner said.

In the first quarter, Apple had 48.2 percent of the global tablet market and Android was No. 2 with 43.4 percent, while Microsoft’s Windows-based tablets nabbed 7.4 percent of the market, according to recent data from Strategy Analytics.

For more, see PCMag’s review of the BlackBerry PlayBook.

UPDATE: BlackBerry issued the following statement on Tuesday afternoon: “The comments that Thorsten made yesterday are in line with previous comments he has made about the future of mobile computing overall, and the possibilities that come with a platform like BlackBerry 10. We continue to evaluate our tablet strategy, but we are not making any shifts in that strategy in the short term. When we do have information about our PlayBook strategy, we will share it.”