And a tablet to keep my bad side away

[grumpyolddog]

Oh tablets, what are you like?

I recently played with an iPad. A friend of mine has one. He also has a MacBook Air, an iPhone and one of those all-in-one Macs. He has cleansed his body-thetans and sold his credit cards to L Steve Jobbard.

One other thing he has is a two year old girl. She loves the iPad and can use it easily. This amused me. And

Comments

[grumblesmurf]

Well, despite being neither a Mac fanboy nor having any care about being fashionable or owning many pairs of shoes, I have an iPad, and I've found it to be remarkably useful for what I want to do with it.

I'm not using it for any 'serious' work, but for pootling around the web, checking mail, sshing into servers, a bit of media playing (iPlayer, E4, other streaming TV), an ebook reader, and for playing a few games on, I think it's a decent bit of kit.

My decision to buy one was never intended to be as a replacement for a PC or a 'proper' computer - it was bought to be used as a portable entertainment/network device. I've got a few cloud-based bits of storage for putting anything that I'm likely to want to access off the home network, so storage capacity isn't an issue for me. The form factor works for me - herself's Archos tablet is a little small for what I'd want, and in terms of apps I've found sufficient for what I want to using it for. Android might be more hackable and tweakable as a platform, but on the occasions that I've used it it hasn't felt quite as polished and whole as the iOS equivalent.

So for what I wanted one for, it's doing just fine. I appreciate that if you wanted a 'proper' computer that has the portability of a tablet form factor and the versatility that a PC can give you there isn't anything out there at present that provides it and thus you would come to the conclusion that tablets are a bit shite right now.

That said, I make use of the pad for a good few hours pretty much every day (well, apart from the last couple of weeks when I've been otherwise engaged), so it works just fine for me. Not going to defend it nor aggressive rave about it any more than that.

If MS actually produce a decent tablet PC that is capable of being a useful productivity tool then that may well fill the gap that the entertainment devices can't fit at present, but I've no requirement for one myself right now. When and if that position changes there may be something on the market that will fit, but I don't disagree that there isn't anything suitable right here and now.

[grumpyolddog]

Welcome back :)