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.
I have a 6.8″ phone, that’s pretty big. But my eyesight ain’t the best, so I also have an 8.4″ tablet (both android). The tablet is vastly easier to read for me. But sometimes I still use my phone.
Also, the tablet is just way more comfortable to play mobile games on; but the phone is better for emulators due it it’s size, and having a controller that clips onto the phone.
About 8 years ago I bought my first tablet. After that my phone became a camera, Hotspot and back up. As far as I’m concerned, it’s your lack of imagination, instead of the quality of the device. I spend between 6 and 8 hours a day on my tablets. They are so much easier to look at content. Fixing photos it isn’t even a competition. I’m typing this on my s10 ultra, with 2.5 gb of total storage, while my s11 ultra is charging.
Writing Word documents or creating Excel spreadsheets, why would you use a crappy little phone, when the screen on my tablet is larger than some laptops?
I watched an EPL soccer/football match on the s11whixh is why I’m charging it.
BTW because of the tablets I’m still using my six year old s20
I use mine almost daily and nightly… it’s a Chinese cheapie, so I’m pushing it to the limits. It’s a couple of yrs old already and it’s the 1st and only one. Just to download a bunch of videos, movies, music and tv shows and then transfer the whole lot to a portable HHD for later use. Use it also for reading news and other things pertinent for the day…browsing… shopping and other things that are going on out in this messed up dysfunctional world that seems kinda towards its end?? What u think about it ?? The small ph screen’s not good for the eyes of someone up in their years. Also the glasses don’t help believe it or not…they make it worse.
Otherwise just working it till it dies…
I use my tablet for an e-reader. I love it, it makes reading easier at night as well, because of the night light setting
I don’t know it sounds like you all are confused about what you can actually use a tablet for nowadays I have a Galaxy S9 Plus size 12.4 in tablet and I use it for everything I use it as my infotainment center in my vehicle as well as I use dex in the hotel room at home wherever I connect wirelessly to the TV you got a wireless keyboard and mouse plug a USB hub in now I’ve got hard drive with all my information on it I don’t know what y’all are talking about I love my tablet I mean good God it’s got an octa core processor and 12 gigs of RAM and 512 GB of internal storage I mean for the love of God what else do you need and it’s got good sound I carry a OnePlus 8T for my regular phone and it’s good and it’s got same processor and RAM as my tablet but on the tablet like I said I connect wirelessly with dex to whatever TV or portable monitor and it’s a full desktop environment separate from the tablet so it’s like having two separate environments at the same time I love it. I mean don’t get me wrong I still have a PC as well that I use for well we won’t get into that here LOL
I use my tablet as a second screen when I’m working at my desk for things like live news or other video content that I can have on while I’m working. I like what Google did with the pixel tablet in making a dock accessory for it that lets it function as a sort of Google home hub with a nice speaker. That works well for me in my use case because when I’m not using it, it’s still useful as a home hub to display weather info or photo frame or cast music around the house, and when I am using it for media consumption it has better audio thanks to the dock, and also I don’t have to buy a separate stand or case for it. I don’t really take the tablet with me outside of the house, but it’s nice that it’s an option. Being an old fart it’s also nice to have that larger screen size for reading as well, which I do on the couch or during lunch breaks sometimes too. But for a daily driver or primary sort of device it just doesn’t fit my groove. Like most people I’d imagine, I do most of my daily stuff on either my phone or a laptop if the phone can’t cut it. A tablet seems like a nice extra device primarily for media consumption.
I have a flight and racing sim rig, and though I am planning on building button and instrument panels for input and miscellaneous, tablets and old cellphones are pretty darn useful for the same purpose. I briefly used GameGlass but found it too limited and expensive besides. I found it easiest just to make my own using LiveCode, using a couple of the sample stacks to make the ‘server’ app which receives inputs over a simple http connection and emulates button presses. The ‘client’ was a bare bones GUI (though with extra effort I could have made it pretty) that just sent commands to the server as chat messages, like “headlights_toggle”, “ld_gear”, “hyperdrive” etc. The server would check a csv for a matching command, and fire off the keybind if such a match exists. Dead simple and didn’t work well if using 2 or more client devices at once, and latching keybinds (click button to fire off a “held” button, click again to release hold) would fail in strange ways, sometimes needing a reboot even after killing processes. I’m planning on doing active instrumentation in the future, for fun and because I’ll have plenty of buttons. I definitely have no shortage of old Android phones and a couple of tablets lying around. They say just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should, I say that because I can is the best and only reason I need! Boredom hits different as middle age approaches, I’m finding.
I use a small tablet at work to listen to podcasts and music. there is a loophole in the company electronics policy that specifies no cellphones on the production floor, but does not mention tablets. it is obviously not a cellphone. no one has called me out about it yet.