Eric Schmidt is stating the obvious today. He says that the future of magazines is on the tablet. Duh.

At a Magazine Publishers Association conference on Wednesday, Schmidt took the stage with Wired editor in chief Scott Dadich to talk about the future, which is mobile, and how magazines fit into it.

Schmidt admitted, but is also confident that magazines' future is not in print but on tablets.

"Tablets are now more popular than PCs," he said. "You can read it, it knows where you are, it has an accelerometer. There are all sorts of stuff [publishers] can do in tablet magazines [that they] couldn't do in print magazines."

Five years from now, the world will have "powerful, tablet-looking things — [devices] that look roughly like a tablet — as a substitute for traditional media," Schmidt predicted. Those tablets will have apps that are "incredibly immersive," including magazine apps, which will take advantage of people's social graphs, location data and other features to offer a more interactive experience, he said.

"It should be very positive for [publishers]," Schmidt added. "In the world of online advertising, the location signal allows you much more targeted ads [than print] ads today … [The more targeted they are], the more likely [readers] are to click, and the more likely advertisers will bid up the price of [ads]."