Or is it iPad-Questioning?
Except we're not talking about an iPad. But that aside …
So, another of those odd confluences of thought.
1. I keep playing and playing and playing with the thought of a tablet, but haven't figured out what I'd do with one.
2. I'm going on an Alaska cruise in July. And looking at what both the cruise line and Verizon tell me, I'm not going to be hooking up to the Internet much. Not without taking out a second mortgage.
So work with me here …
I was doing Verizon research today regarding #2 (and Verizon's coverage map simply doesn't work under Chrome, which is damned stupid of them). But eventually the bottom line was:
a. I really don't want to use the ship-board cellular capability, because it costs godawful amounts with Verizon.
b. I really don't want to use the ship-board WiFi capability, because it costs godawful amounts with the cruise line.
So, fine. I got the Verizon coverage map, and I will have some level of phone and data coverage once we get past British Columbia and down into the Alaska Panhandle. Maybe. But then, at least, I'll have the ability to tweet and post pictures and …
… and I really don't want to be dependent on my smartphone. I love it, and I can tweet with it, but for anything more than that I really don't want to be limited, for a week, to typing on my phone.
Ugh.
So then my mind starts to wandering. Always dangerous.
What if … I picked up a MiFi (portable WiFi hotspot)? Then I could bring one of our computers (do I have to do that already with the business trip the week before) and, while in Verizon data range, use that with my computer to be able to post stuff.
(Work computer? My netbook?)
The MiFi (or "Miffy" as we called it) served us really well, as a rental, in Italy, mostly for the smartphones, but also for my netbook.
But wait …
What if … in addition to a MiFi, I went ahead and got a tablet. Now I don't need the netbook with me. Though I'll want a decent Android tablet (since I have an Android smartphone), one with a keyboard dock, like the Samsung Galaxy Tab … and then I can blog, and tweet, and do all sorts of cool stuff that works a heck of a lot better with a keyboard. And …
… which is … really something … I need to be doing … on an Alaska cruise …?
And then the whole fantasy comes crashing down.
But I'm still pondering.
Miffy!
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Want to borrow my iPad?
Sure. Let me know when you’ll be by. 🙂
@Amanda – Heh. Thanks, but I’ll puzzle this out without it. Besides, it might start attracting me to the Dark Side, and then all my friends with iPads and iPhones would mock me.
So, I've carted an iPad on trips for several years because…
1) It really does run for ten hours on a charge, and that's amazing on a long plane flight.
2) It really is good enough for light email and document editing and blogging and social networking, even without a dock keyboard. It reads anything anyone cares to send me.
3) It actually fits in an aircraft seat in flight without wondering if the person in front of you is going to lean their seat back and shatter your laptop display.
4) It's got enough books on it at once that I can flit from book to book as I often do, and I find it easier to read on than a Kindle. (Have not tried a Fire, I imagine those are better)
I'd probably go the Android route instead of the Apple one, if only because that's the phone infrastructure I'm already using. But thanks for the general observations on the iPad and, I suspect, tablets in general, +Kurt Piersol.
One sticking point in the discussions and my internal debate, is that I've got a netbook. And while netbooks and tablets are not the same device (one is a PC trying to be small but still functional; one is a smartphone trying to be bigger and more functional), their functional uses have a large degree of overlap. It's where they don't that I keep being tempted.
It's not about iOS vs. Android, you're right that the choice is largely driven by what kind of phone you have.
But I've had netbooks and they've never seemed like a decent replacement for a laptop in terms of tradeoffs. Tablets are a whole different animal. It's actually pretty amazing to realize how large a shift they are, and it's really hard to describe to someone who has not used them much.
First of all, your posture and where you are comfortable using them is utterly different. Using a tablet like a netbook is actually not that appealing to me, and even though my case lets me do this, I seldom actually want to.
Tablets work really well when you are curled up in an easy chair, or standing in line, or in the back seat of a car. Much better than a laptop or netbook does. And weirdly enough, those turn out to be places I really like to do computing and communicating.
Tablets are amazing to sketch on, almost unimaginably better than anything else you can get. There are Cintiq displays from wacom that do this in fixed locations at fantastic prices, but a slate is just amazing for doing this in the places where you actually sketch, like out at the beach or during your vacation.
Tablets are also a totally fine big screen TV replacement, particularly the iPad (3 but Apple took the numbers off). It's hugely more comfortable to watch stuff on a slate instead of a netbook, just because there's no big fragile "L" shaped thingie.
Lastly, there's that whole class of "dragging stuff around" based application that's just incredibly better when you are "touching" the stuff you are dragging around with your finger. Try some of the structured drawing programs made for tablets to get an idea of this. The user interface for this stuff is evolving, and there are rough edges in a lot of programs, but already they feel better and different from the laptop/netbook experience. The one that comes to mind for me, as an iOS user, is Keynote. Wow, is it different from working on a laptop screen on a presentation.
Thanks, cool summary, +Margie Kleerup. Yeah, I got the netbook a few years back as a novel-writing tool. It's fine that it's a Windows machine (and so can use the tools from all my other Windows machines), but the form factor is definitely a huge compromise.
Food for thought. Thanks again.