Friday, December 30, 2011

The tablet in my life

A few weeks ago, woot was having a very good deal and I broke down and bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab.  Although i am a huge gadget whore, I had successfully resisted the tablet craze, unable to explain to myself what gap it would fill. I have a netbook. I have a laptop, an android phone and an ipod touch. A tablet felt like an indulgence that was inexcusable.

The siren call of a really good deal broke through that barrier, and it has revolutionized my approach to mobile and living room computing. My netbook has been shelved. On the netbook, browsing was a constant frustration of infinite scrolling and windows that did not scroll and locked up the browser. About 40% of all online forms have a layout that fails on my netbook. I have not had this problem once on the galaxy. The biggest problem on the galaxy is that i get routed to the "mobile" version of a website, when i would sometimes prefer the regular version. I can see a growing need for  the android os to not always be designated as "mobile".

I had serious reservations about the lack of a keyboard, I am 6 ft tall and do not have small fingers. Both my Htc Evo, which i love, and my ipod will give me sore arms and finger cramps if i use them for too long. The larger keyboard on the Galaxy pretty much resolves this problem and also significantly cuts back on typos. To switch it up, I also use a fat grip cosmonaut stylus, from a recent Kickstarter project.

The Galaxy is more than a sit and browse machine. With a bigger screen than my netbook, and Docs to Go installed, I recently used it during a work meeting to access some spreadsheets. I have used it for basic photo editing (I got an SD card adapter), and am in the middle of creating a christmas slideshow with the built in movie maker app. While it is not a workstation, I am finding it easier than ever to create web consumable content...and hey, it even broke me out of my not blogging rut!