4 ms·
Nice editorial. I have gone back and forth on this topic with myself for awhile. I finally caved and bought a pre-order Notion Ink Adam that I recently sold.
by nesbot 15y ago
Nice editorial. I have gone back and forth on this topic with myself for awhile. I finally caved and bought a pre-order Notion Ink Adam that I recently sold. I used that money and purchased an Asus Transformer with keyboard dock and an iPad2 with the goal to return my least favourite. Every time I see a 10" keyboard I get excited and think how great it would be to have - so light and portable. I always drop back down from the high once I use the keyboard and remember how bad they all are.
I find my tablet (read iPad) is great for consuming content while laying around. I don't think they are quite as awkward to use as the author suggests, at least for me. However, I agree that at times when I want to be more productive it frustrates me and I always move to my laptop or desktop to actually get 'er done.
Another usage for me is that they are great for kids in the car.
I have a beefy desktop, 13" laptop, iPad2 and iPhone4. If you held a gun to my head and said I had to give one up I would, without hesitation, hand over the iPad.
- anigbrowl 15y agoi had the opposite experience. I had a a laptop and liked it OK, but I was getting sick of the screen wastage - I read a great deal of material in PDF and long article form, and I'm sick to death of web design getting in the way. On 80%+ of the websites I frequent, 30-40% of the screen is empty, with acres of blank space to each side. I was getting to the point of wanting to turn the laptop on its side so I could have something with the same aspect ratio as a printed page. There's a limit to the amount of text I can read on a smartphone without eyestrain but I can work on a tablet for hours in comfort. The keyboard works OK for me; I wouldn't want to write a novel on it but it's fine for notes and short comments like this (the on-screen keyboard, that is...I prefer a plugin one for long-form writing). I'm so much happier reading PDF files and the like now. Web pages, not so much. Getting a tablet has made me realize just how bad many of them are, and how poorly many webmasters and bloggers use their RSS feeds. No wonder services like instapaper and readbility are doing so well. Surprise casualty: Wikipedia. Needs a lot more work to be functional on a tablet. The other thing is the multitouch functionality. My hobbies include drawing and electronic music and having a high resolution control panel is absolutely killer for these applications, in much the same way that the mouse was a huge game changer by freeing people from the command line.
- nesbot 15y agoThat is one thing that made me keep the iPad over the others. The aspect ratio is much nicer than the wide screen versions. I do as well frequently turn it to be portrait for reading. I agree that responding to tweets, emails or forums and the like that don't require more than a few sentences is completely acceptable for me as well. I am just saying, for me, its the one I would give up first, but I do currently choose to keep it.
- anigbrowl 15y agoTo each their own, I guess - I specifically wanted the wide screen aspect ratio because of reading a lot of documents. I have a nice PDF application that automatically zooms to the text instead of the margins, though.
- nesbot 15y agoReading is the reason I enjoy the portrait aspect ratio. Its the same reason my main desktop monitor is a 23" rotated in portrait (vertical) mode, 2048px high. I think we are saying the same thing, no?