There’s an old saying that the happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat, and the day they sell it. For me, the happiest days of an Android tablet owner’s life are the day they buy a new one, and the day they buy a newer one. For some reason, I always buy tablets with great expectations, get them set up, and then promptly lose them in a pile on my desk, not to be seen again. Then a shiny new tablet gets my attention in a year or so, and the cycle repeats.
You might be thinking that I just buy cheap junk tablets. It is true that I have. But I have also bought new Galaxy and Asus tablets with the same result. Admittedly, I have owned several Surface Laptops and Pros, and I do use them. But I can’t remember the last time I have used one without the keyboard. They aren’t really tablets — they are just laptops that can also be heavy, awkward tablets.
Why?
I get the sense that iPad users get more use from their devices, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because Android tablets are really just blown-up phones. These days, my phone is big enough for most things. Sure, the tablet is bigger, but it isn’t that much bigger. In addition, my phone usually has a much better CPU, camera, and everything else. Not to mention it is constantly connected to the Internet, even if I’m not in range of a known WiFi router.
Read webpages? Phone. Play games? Phone. Deal with e-mail? Phone. The only advantage is if I put the tablet’s cheap Bluetooth keyboard on and use it like a laptop. But wait, I can just as well do that with the phone. Plus, voice typing for things like e-mails and messages is much better than it used to be.
Then there’s using it as a laptop replacement. When my laptop weighed a ton and got a few hours on a battery, that seemed like a good idea. But modern laptops don’t weigh that much, and they have pretty reasonable battery life, too. I always install some kind of Linux, like Termux and even Termux-X11, so I can use it as a lightweight Linux laptop. And I still don’t use it. (My setup is similar to the one in the video below, although you may have a few hiccups getting it all to work.)
Desktop
Phone, tablet, or laptop, I’m still more likely to be found at my desk behind a big screen with a serious computer. Maybe it’s a generation gap, like clinging to a landline phone (I don’t) or a DVD player (another thing I don’t do). Maybe it is that most of the things I do on the computer benefit from large split screens and fast computing times.
Of course, there’s also the gadget factor. My desktop computer is huge and heavy, full of cards and water coolers, disk drives and fans. Some people trick out their cars. It is hard to expand most laptops, phones, and tablets, although I have had some success taking them apart for simple upgrades. They never seem to go back together quite right, though.
So Then?
So then what do I actually want a tablet for? I don’t know. Which leads me to ask you: what are you using a tablet for? Do you really use it regularly? Or is it another gadget collecting dust? It doesn’t count if you repurpose them for some dedicated use: a second screen, a touchpad, or a 3D printer controller. I mean using them as a replacement for your normal computing platform. Let us know in the comments.
Maybe I’d be happier making my own tablet.
browsing web (phone is too small), watching movies, reading pdf datasheets (in portrait mode), some games
My tablet lives on my kitchen table so I can watch stuff while I eat. That’s it, everything else happens on my phone or my desktop.
I glued a magnet to mine and stuck it on the fridge to pull recipes up when I’m baking.
Before that it was in my car for tuner studio.
i need an actual keyboard or the experience is not a good one. this is why my phone is mostly just for two factor authentication and something to do while waiting for a root canal
Out of curiosity, how many hundreds of teeth do you have (left)?
I have an older apple iPad and an iPhone XE 2020. I use the phone for surfing only in a pinch away from home. I love the small true pocket size, though. The tablet moves with me in the home, even in the bathtub! I use my Macbook Pro which is effectively a desktop machine, for development, remote desktop, or websites that require a lot of interaction. This, I have found to be the most efficient use of all of the machines.
Btw MS remote desktop works rather well for me on the iPad.
lol yeah — I have a $40 used Chromebook specifically for bathtub use. I’ve been using it for years and so far nothing bad has happened to it. But if something bad does happen, that was only $40.
Which is why we shelled out for the iPad keyboard – though it turns out that’s what we use least a few years on. Still gets regular use though for kids doing homework, also good for watching videos, and we use it for procreate (for work) and for reading longer read websites.
About once a week I need to hand somebody a document for them to look over. 20 years ago, it would surely have been paper. Handing them a phone or laptop is impractical. And sharing the document electronically isn’t tye thing for reasons wildly out of scope here. My Android tablet is perfect for that meeting as a replacement for needing to print something every week. These days a cheapo android tablet is cheaper than one inkjet ink reload, and much more reliable.
I originally got the tablet for filmmaking. It’s perfect as an auxiliary screen that fits in a binder that can view a feed from a wifi transmitter, without running down the battery on my phone all day. But that’s basically it, as a screen or modernized printouts. For any work where I need to input text or manipulate stuff, real computer. For maximum portability, a phone. My tablet could be a totally passive embedded viewing device that doesn’t have a real OS or a GPU or gigabytes of digital storage, and I’d be equally happy with it.
i had to write the usb driver and install it as an untrusted user which means it dont perform when other apps act up.. however mice attach and run in kernel… modify a cheap cy6 !?!
Yes, just, yes, thank you. I have an iPhone, multiple iPads, the odd Android tablet, and a laptop. Each has their place.
But for actual USE, the day-to-day stuff, I find myself coming back to the traditional desktop computer with a useful keyboard and mouse and big screen (readable! even at my age!) My wife has trouble with whatever web page on her device? Let’s go use the COMPUTER, wherein it works and off we go.
TL;DR: A “device” is not the single all-encompassing solution to all problems.
I don’t have a tablet, but often wish I had an ipad. I’m not in the apple ecosystem though.
They wife does have one ipad, that I often borrow for reading some books. I do prefer physical books, but frequently I just want to consult or read a chapter. Besides, I use her tablet for some music stuff, mainly garage band and synth emulations. She uses it more frequently than her laptop.
I had a kindle once, and I find kindle either to small or to expensive depending on the model, also too locked up. Hope to never use one again, may try some other kind of e-reader in the future.
I had some android tablet in the past, but I would avoid them today. find them a bit neglected from manufacturers in comparison to phones. I use android phones and don’t like how often apps that I used to like simply become incompatible with android version and become obsolete out of nowhere.
Well for one, I’m not buying a phone bigger than 6″: if I need a TV I’ll buy a real TV. (Yeah, there’s not much of a choice of smaller phones now, and I’m not buying one that costs more than a decent TV either… Mine is an uphill battle).
A 10″ tablet is great for reading PDFs. It is also better than a phone for reading EPUBs because less scrolling and tapping is needed. And mine is a cheap Alcatel device with a plastic screen (who cares, it works!) and slow WiFi that I got for free from my internet provider… As an e-book reader, it’s been great.
I’m still on my 2020 iPhone 12 mini because I don’t want to give up the size…
Yep. When the tablet weighs half a kilo including the covers, there’s no comfortable way of holding it unless you put it on a stand on a desk, and then you’re hunching over it poking at a touch screen developing muscle cramps between your shoulder blades.
Tablets are for people with unhurried lives…phones for most, desktops for work.
The kinds of people with tablets are the folks you often see in parks who don’t have to hunch for pennies
Pdf suck generally for reading. Good for printing, but for reading, i need the columns to be at least 40 characters wide. Also a bad match for phones.
Phones reached a peak width somewhere around Note2 and Note4 era. Lately they are just uselessly taller, I’d prefer 1/2 wider than 2 inches taller.
Try a Galaxy Fold 2 or newer (7.6″), assuming a used price of 300-500 is acceptable to you. For me it replaced 2 devices and I rarely use a laptop anymore. Possibly even less in future if Steam continues pushing the state of the art with Proton 11 and ARM to x86 translation layer.
The critical success factor for ipads, for me, is the magic keyboard. (with a 10inch M1 ipad) Not the folio keyboard. The trackpad/touchscreen combo and self supporting nature of the magic keyboard (at a wide range of angles) means I do almost all my casual computing on it – only dev work has me rolling out the laptop. If you haven’t done 3D cad with shapr3d on the ipad using a pencil, you haven’t lived. Super intuitive.
It’s not the format the problem but the OS.
I use my x86 tablet-PC every day.
It’s not the OS but the use case.
I bought a tablet for browsing the TV-guide and random websites during commercial breaks when watching TV.
Then I stopped watching TV because there was never anything interesting on, and I was just browsing the web on the couch, uncomfortably trying to balance a glass slab in my hands, instead of sitting in a comfy chair in front of the large screen at my computer desk.
I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4. I use it multiple times a day. It’s what I carry when I travel even though I had a small laptop.
If it died today, I would replace it tomorrow.
It’s getting a bit long in the tooth now. Android 10 IIRC. I’m starting to run into apps that it won’t run, or do unpredictable things when they do run.
I did install a virus scanner as my friends at Samsung haven’t pushed a security update in several years. Better than nothing I suppose.
Installing a ‘virus scanner’s is actually probably worse than nothing. Greater attack surface, selling your data (how is it free?), and TONS of historic cases of mobile antimalware apps themselves being malware.
I tried carrying a tablet for travel with the idea that I could whip it out instead of the laptop on the train or bus, but then I realized it’s just as difficult to dig out of the backpack and all it does is add weight. Between the phone and the laptop, it doesn’t do the job of a laptop and it’s more cumbersome than the phone, so I just leave it on the coffee table at home.
Yes yes yes.
In my experience, people who use ipads are people who don’t really use computers. About the only person I really know who uses one seriously is a fellow-volunteer in a volunteer organisation; I routinely need to help her because she can’t figure out how to send a document she’s written on the ipad.
About eight years go I bought a laptop that folds around into a bit (15″) tablet. I still use it, but I can count the number of times I’ve used it as a tablet on one hand. It even came with a bluetooth pen; likewise been used about five times and only for the novelty value.
I tend to read books on my phone and a while ago I thought maybe I should buy a tablet to read books on since the phone screen is inconveniently small? I bought a Pixel fold instead. This was an expensive decision but the right one – one device is better than two.
Every now and then I think I’d like an eInk tablet for reading books. But I suspect they would go the same way – never used. Not to mention that they seem to be bloody-mindedly crap. The most popular ones don’t use the Google app store so say goodbye to reading any books you’ve purchased anywhere else.
I bought a “convertible” laptop for my wife, thinking that it would be handy to use in the kitchen on the counter folded into a self-standing V (upside down). In several years, I’ve never once seen her use it in tablet configuration, for any purpose. Videos on the phone. Financial stuff on computer in normal laptop mode.
I wanted a tablet, until I got an iPad at work for use with a productivity tracking application, and found that I only use it when I don’t have any other choice. Laptops are so light and capable that I just take it to meetings and such. The iPad doesn’t offer any significant advantages for me. Note: I am not a (willing) participant in the Applesphere, so I could be missing something.
I’d be happy if they’d give you a decent amount of atorage space after the os install. Mine is complaining about running out of space and getting slower due to os bloat. Runs great hn nw bu wih8n a year it is notably slower!
My kids watch youtube (and play a few games) on their cheapo temu tablets. They like that there’s a little privacy and they don’t have to fight for use of the single TV.
I don’t have much use for a tablet…i’d kind of like one for sheet music and i actually have one for that purpose but i haven’t worked out how to make it usable yet.
I got the 7″ Nexus tablet back when they first appeared and my biggest disappointment is that after i realized i would never use it again, i hung it on the wall and re-purposed it as an alarmclock. And it became too slow for that function! Which is unbelievable but i watched it happen. It just got slower every day until the “swipe right to turn off the beeping” was too slow. I replaced the OS with cyanogenmod and it was better for only a couple weeks. There was something seriously wrong with the tablet, probably hardware…and something much worse wrong with the OS.
Sheet music is the thing that I consistently use my tablet for, and was the reason I got a 13” tablet. It’s replaced all of the sheet music I used to print.
I mostly use the forScore app (easy to reorder/duplicate pages and organize pieces into set lists) along with a Bluetooth page turn pedal (Airturn Duo iirc). It’s great having hands-free page turns with violin and guitar.
Using it with the pen accessory also largely replaced the plethora of half-empty handwritten notebooks I used to have, since I can bring it with me when I know I’ll be taking notes instead of yet another fresh notebook.
The only computing tasks I really use it for are checking how well some apps I’m developing translate to the larger screen with a touch interface.
iPads are super useful for in-flight use. All of your charts and everything on something like Foreflight.
I designed the jacket covers for the book series I wrote. The Ipad, combined with Procreate allowed me to do just that.
I have tried to find an iPad shaped hole in my life for years. For a long time, it was where Apple was putting all of its energy. I think they planned to stop making computers altogether in favor of tablets.
I don’t have that hole in my life. It might be my age, but I am firmly in the laptop camp. I admit that I have tried to touch my MacBook Pro’s screen to interact. (Then again, I’ve also tried to swipe magazine pages :D )
Remember when the guy that scored 1000 win10 tablets, and was giving them away 20 at a time here on HAD? Well, I got myself 20 of these and get plenty of use out of them, I have 3 lit up and running right now.
I use an iPad Air at work for taking photos directly into onenote and adding annotations, when doing a walk down for a new project. The company chose an iPad because of the better integration with Microsoft products than the Android tablets.
(I would prefer Android and Linux, but work is deeply into Microsoft)
The plant doesn’t allow cellphones and some area require a device that is rated for a hazardous environment , which the iPad can be with the right case.
Kitchen TV replacement
Unfortunately tablets are just crippleware computers that severely restrict you to someone else’s vision of what a computer should be used for. Like going to only a single restaurant all your life and being force fed the same meal day in and day out irregardless of what you order. The only time the meal changes is when there’s an “upgrade” and they take away one of the items on your plate and remove one of your pieces of cutlery and then tell you it’s better that way.
I can read a book on my phone because its just text and the text can reflow on the fly making a pretty decent experience.
I can’t read engineering datasheets like that. Download a data sheet from TI or AD or whoever and I can’t read the graphs etc without endless zoom in and out, very uncomfortable. However my tablet has zero problems with that.
I also use my tablet in the workshop to look at CAD drawings for the same reason, no zoom in / zoom out.
Same situation in the lab for reading schematics.
In summary, software can reflow text making plain text usable on a phone, but you can’t reflow a schematic or a graph from a transistor datasheet to make it practical to use a phone.
Same here: excellent companion to any projects in the garage when any kind of digital reference (be a web page, pdf, video) is needed. Bought a used thinkpad x12, put a rugged case and run linux on it, with firefox sync account so I can just send a tab to it.
I have a big ol Tab P12 and most of the time it stays on the fridge on a magnetic mount.
It’s a calendar, shopping list, recipe reader, and sometimes a comic book reader. Which reminds me that I have a series to catch up on!
TBH it’s not nearly as useful as a laptop. The launcher is whack (and the recent menu breaks for other launchers) and Google calendar’s Android UI is definitely intended for vertical layout. Remember to set charge limits so the battery doesn’t deteriorate from constant charging.
For me, ipads are what i tried to find for a long time in other hardware – making music (cubasis, loopy pro etc) and painting (procreate). And the Ipad mini has just the right size for using it on the go, more portable than a laptop, more usable than a phone.
I read and play time waster games on my iPad. (Reading and commenting here for example, right now.) Anything substantially creative I’m doing on a general purpose computer.
I do use my tablet quite a lot. I’ll use the phone (Galaxy S22) for interwebs access when I’m out and about, I find the tablet (Galaxy Tab S10+) is much more usable with its large screen. It gets significant use in the evening at home and most of the day when we’re in the RV. That said, I’m responding on my Linux desktop (NUC) . I use a Macbook for solid modeling and 3D printing.
Not sure I have too much more to contribute than the other replies, but for me – it’s the right device for the right situation.
Heavy computing – my desktop that I upgrade as needed. Also has ~30 TB storage in it
portable computing – my laptop. It’s strong enough that it can run Jetbrains IDEs without issue and I think can maybe run 1 VM, but can definitely run some Docker/Podman containers
99% of the time outside of a building – my phone meets my needs including as a book (I prefer my ereader, but don’t always have it with me), music device, podcast device, gaming device (not my #1 choice, but good for some Slay the Spire or Gwent), and….voice calling (here and there)
So what is a tablet good for?
Watching Youtube or Netflix (back when I had it) at the dinner table if I want to show something to others or above the kitchen sink if I want to watch something while I do dishes.
reading graphic novels, comics, cookbooks, or anything that isn’t just a regular black and white book
a device the kids can use to Chromecast since they don’t have their own mobile phones
The place in my life for a tablet (notes, datasheets, organization) is well filled by an e-ink tablet. I don’t have to wake the screen constantly, and the battery life is measured in weeks not hours.
To your point, anything I could/would do on a tablet, I can do on my phone, so the tablets always end up collecting dust. If I could easily run Linux software on it, a tablet as a mobile working computer could work, but using the terminal on a touchscreen is garbage so I’d end up carrying a small Bluetooth keyboard, maybe a mouse, maybe a backup battery bank…. At that point I’m carrying a laptop with extra steps.
I don’t have one. Never saw a use for them. Everything I do seems to require a keyboard. Dislike the concept of ‘swiping’ even on phones. Reading is of course with a real book. When traveling, I just stuff a ‘real’ book or two in the bag. Done. Laptop stays in the bag until needed/wanted in the hotel room or destination. Laptop works much better for a mobile platform in my experience.
That said, I see them used all the time now in the medical arena. Swipe, sign here, read here, sign here, etc.
Don’t see doctors/nurses with a pin and paper form anymore….
The smaller screens mostly get used in my household during grid down situations, but soon we will be off grid and backed up by a lot of new batteries. Perhaps larger format, Linux based, full colour e-ink devices would get more use.
10+yrs ago I used to carry around a Motorola Lapdock 500 Pro. Which was essentially a keyboard, large screen & backup battery for my phone. Despite some weird interface translations, I loved it and thought it was the way the future was going. I still think lapdocks could be the best option if their price wasn’t closer to just buying a whole laptop.
My wife uses a n 11 inch tablet for sheet music. It fits on a music stand and a bluetooth foot switch lets her change pages (she doesn’t like the autoscroll). When she plays with others, she uses it to record a song, so can play it as a backing track when she practices by herself. The same software on her laptop makes it easier to administer the sheet music database, and serves as a complete backup. Beats a stack of paper sheet music any day.
I have a tablet … Sort of. My Galaxy Fold 2 is a 7.6″ tablet. I have ADHD and always forgot my regular tablet. Also by the time I need a bigger tablet I’m better off with a 13″, 14″ or 16″ Thinkpad (X1 Nano – X1 – X1 Extreme).
For real though, Folding phones are where you want to be. Kinda sad the Surface Duo failed, twin glass 16×9 screens is a good compromise for durability.
I love my Fold 7, the folding phones are having your cake and eating it too.
Phone size, but fold out to a small tablet for a bigger screen whenever you need it. I love it.
The last tablet I purchased was an Apple iPad (it’s now referred to as the “GEN 1” iPad). I have it on a mount in the kitchen. I look at weather reports on it in the morning. Never found a good reason to have bought it. It’s not about the tablet, it’s about having to hold your hand in the air all the while you are using the thing. It’s like a phone in that respect. I don’t use my phone except for calling, texting and taking pictures with the Flir IR camera. Screen is big for a phone but stupid small for anything Internet related. I use a desktop for everything else unless I go outside and work on the car (Toughbook CF-74) or travel (Apple Macbook Air Pro). Tablets are like crippled little laptops or phones without the phone features. You can try to use a tablet but you end up with your neck hurting from looking down at your lap or you pop yourself in the face when you fall asleep watching something. You spend too much time finding something to prop the thing up on so that you can avoid problem or you buy a cover and a case and end up with that crippled laptop again. The reason the OP keeps pushing them aside is they are kinda useless.
I have a cute 8″ tablet that I use all the time, but only for watching youtube and our national TV system’s app.
I work from my desktop computer mostly.
A while ago I wanted a small laptop and someone here suggested a StarLabs Starlite Mk 3. That had just gone out of sale and I waited a while for the StarLite 4, which is a (linux) tablet with magnetically attached form factor.
It took a few months to get produced and shipped, but two days after I had opened the box I knew it was a misbuy.
What I hated most about it was the form factor: because the tablet is not firmly attached to the screen, it needed to be properly held by the screen and when standing on the table, it needed a pop-out support. Meaning it needed about 10 cm more of desk depth than a comparable laptop.
You also could not really pick it up one-handed: the tablet would slide out of the laptop sleeve and when holding the tablet “screen” the keyboard once slid out of my hand, making me loose my grip on the screen, I dropped both.
Other than that, it was too heavy to hold in your hand as a tablet (something I also think of IPads), the keyboard was awful and I didn’t like the high-resolution display, but the awkward form factor did it for me.
A while ago I gave it to a friend with “pay me when you like it, I don’t want it back” but he told me the battery was shot from being unused for more than a year…
I recently took over a work laptop and re-installed Linux on it and use that a few times a week, when I want to do things that I don’t want to type or read on my phone, but when I don’t want to boot up my pc in my cold office which takes a while to warm up (and with the risk that I stay at my pc).
The comments here fully illustrate why the Mac Neo has sold out. Laptops are a popular form factor for a reason. Anybody who wants to do work or type is best serverd by the form factor. Windows laptops are by and large terrible, and Windows is a big part of the problem (the other half seems to be by the time you spend enough for a quality frame you usually get an 8-14 core CPU that makes the PC run hot, loud, or runs the battery down.
The tablet with a case+stand+keyboard is a thing, but it’s also needlessly complicated.
My laptops run Linux (well, all my desktops/servers/sbcs do too). Just switched over to KUbuntu 26.04 LTS on my oldest laptop for functional testing of the new LTS release. Once I am satisfied that all is well there (so far so good), all the others will eventually follow and then be good up to the next LTS cycle.
“Sure, the tablet is bigger, but it isn’t that much bigger.”
Either the author has a huge phone or a tiny tablet. I just checked, my tablet has 3x the area of my phone. Much easier to read.
Size does matter.
A medium android tablet (suitably hacked and unlocked) has ended up being my most- touched computing device. Right size for reading books and sheet music, right size for a TV in odd places like planes and gyms, great stylus input for notes, art, and brainstorming, with good enough conversion to text to bang out something that might ordinarily require a keyboard- and when I do need a keyboard I can just plug in some $10 job that’s stashed near where I might need it, and there’s enough screen real estate to look at two things at once.
Phone is camera and music (and phone). Real work-work is desktop.
As a musician, i use my iPad (12.9″ screen) at least once twice a week for either running my band’s mixes or reading any of the 400 charts, lyrics or books i have stored on it. sooooooo much better than paper music. add in a page turner and bad page-turns are history. not doing any of that on a phone or a computer on a gig.
Computer was down for a couple weeks. A cheap tablet allowed the usual, and the ability to log into my server. Laptop might have been better keyboard wise, but I keep a BT one for that.
Im fond of convertible laptops, well a specific sort of convertible laptop.
I really wish Fujitsu would revive its T series. They convert by twisting the screen 180 degrees on a central pivot (T hinge) then folding shut over the keyboard. They discontinued the line after the T939, which was released in 2019.
Lenovo has announced a june release of a model with the same sort of hinge but have unnecessarily added an AI controlled motor to the hinge to allow it to follow its user. Im hoping they keep the hinge style and release a non motorized version.
The current trend in convertibles, to use a simple hinge and fold the screen all the way over leaving the keyboard exposed on the backside of the “tablet” mode, TERRIBLE.
The models where the screen is framed and flips from top to bottom within its frame feels flimsy.
Models where the screen detach from a keyboard always seem to be poorly balanced with too little weight in the keyboard causing them to tip easily.
Ive yet to get hands on one of the sony models in which the screens backing is divided, allowing it to fold at the mid point causing the screen to then cover the keyboard but I cant say I find the design as appealing as the tried and true T Hinge.
I’ve had 3 android tablets and they all quit charging after several years. Two of them never even got an OS update. I won’t be buying any more android tablets.
My Thinkpad X200 tablet still works and will run any Linux distro I put on it. X86 PC tablets are the only ones worth buying.
My killer use case for an iPad is for handwritten notes in meetings(GoodNotes with the Apple pencil), and reading reference material-in my case pdfs of academic journal articles (Bookends). (I’m an engineer working in academic adjacent research.) It absolutely depends on the software-my boss didn’t want me using my personal iPad, so had one assigned to me-but they didn’t have a mechanism in place for me to add software above their supplied package (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, but read-only, which pretty much made it useless for lab data entry).
I use my MacBook Pro for all my programming, writing, graphics, schematics. But the iPad and GoodNotes is great for sketching ideas and probably could do polished graphics for publication, except I’m too impatient to learn another workflow. It’s absolutely killer for taking handwritten notes in lectures and meetings-pages and pages of notes. GoodNotes does text recognition that can even handle my dreadful handwriting well enough to get text I can drop into a text editor and clean up the mistakes. Before I sprang for the stylus on my third iPad, I tried at least half a dozen styluses and they were all but one too laggy. The one that worked the best had a slight hesitation. It used a capacitive transparent disk attached at a swiveling point about the diameter of a slightly enlarged pencil point. The Apple Stylus had no lag and was indistinguishable from writing with a pencil or pen.
On my laptop, I use Bookends to manage hundreds of article references and their associated PDFs. The iPad version syncs with the desktop version, and with the right settings, syncs over the PDFs for reading where ever I end up.
The iPad also serves for reading epubs (I have hundreds, mostly science fiction-its frightening, actually, how much I must have spent over the years for books). A lot of web browsing. Email. YouTube, and streaming services. Which I switch back and forth between the iPad and the laptop.
I have an android tablet for the sole purpose of an alarm clock.
I have yet to find another alarm clock platform that I can program to leave me alone on my days off, or to wake me earlier on Saturdays when my shift starts earlier.
I do like my little CM30 Chromebook tablet and find it useful. I got it on clearance for all of $150. It lives on the little table next to the couch. It’s great for PDFs, the odd non-mobile-friendly website, grocery store ads and coupons. It’s basically my old-man newspaper I read in the living room.
It came with a cheesy Surface pro-ish keyboard and kickstand that attach magnetically, but I usually keep it naked and use it as a tablet. Although they’re nice to have. It’ll run full Linux apps locally or I can remote in to the real computer downstairs. That was VERY useful when I was recovering from knee surgery and spending most of the day upstairs.
I can’t really say whether I’d be just as happy with a small laptop. I was a big fan of netbooks 10 years ago, but there is something nice about the magazine form-factor.
I have 3 tablets: 1st and 2nd gen Nexus 7, and more recent Samsung Tab A7 Lite. One essential use: loaded with ebook field guides (birds, plants, snakes, etc). The Nexus tablets were perfect, same size as most field guide books, and could zoom images to see details. And in color, which is essential. The Samsung is a bit too large, and I like the pure android of Nexus better. Dropped the first Nexus in Alaska, fixed, but now works poorly. Second still Ok, but battery dies quickly. The Tab 7 is heavier and somehow more uncomfortable to use; the extra size and weight is noticeable. Anyone have suggestions?
I use my tablet for three things. If I really want to browse web pages, it’s a much better experience. I mostly use it for reading comic books. This is not possible to do on a phone. My tablet is 12 in. And I use my tablet for games. Because I don’t like playing games on a tiny screen.
The old janky tablet lives as camera monitor and DAKboard base station. The decent Samsung one is my camera screen and remote, as well as media device on the go.
I use mt tab9ultra to rehearse and hold music. Carmina Burana’s vocal score is 124 pages. The ultra is large enough to display it folio sized with performance notes in color. It also displays books at, near, or larger than the physical book.
I use it almost exclusively in portrait mode.
My bought me a foam case for my new Android tablet. It’s those foam cases … really thick , usually come in ridiculous blue or pink colors. Good for kids and in fence … I stuck a hanger through the top part of the case which is the handle. Anyway having this type of setup has allowed me to carry my tablet everywhere as if it were kind of an accessory and it feels indestructible because I think it’s indestructible. I’m not like super gentle with it and I can hang it in the shower if I wanted to. I can like throw it onto my bed if I wanted to. There’s just no fear of harming it because it if you drop this type of case it bounces. But what I’m trying to say is you know if you get those types of kitty cases on your tablet rather than one of those folio ones which I think are more conducive towards putting on a desk. Anyway you will find a lot more use cases for your tablet. So in summary I think your use case depends on the type of case you get!
I need a terminal, keyboard, shell, power and compiler.
phones and tablets make whole habitat for programs, unix world is different tjan findows world. No ptoblem showing data on screen. We need more pieces to make a real tools
I have a iphone SE (1 edition), small screen
but for phoning ideal