Thursday, July 31, 2014
Take two tablets and call me in the morning….
It happens every year as July dwindles its way into August and is as inevitable as the swallows returning to Capistrano or salmon’s need to swim back up stream to its spawning grounds.
“So,” my wife will ask me. “What do you want for your birthday?”
After assuring her that her continued presence in my life is present enough, and watching her roll her eyes, she’ll repeat the question.
“No seriously. What do want?”
As a tech guy and self-proclaimed gadget geek and woodworker, you think that I could give her a list a mile long. Yet lately, I’ve been hard pressed to even come up with two or three things that: A) we can afford, B) won’t land me in divorce court or on the couch for a week or two and C) that I really, really want.
At this point in my life I seem to have all basic hand and power tools that a semi-serious woodworker/DIYer needs (or at least all the tools that will comfortably fit in our garage and still allow us to park our cars in there), and while my tech gear is kind of on the old side, it is still more than sufficient for what at I use it for.
“What about a Kindle Fire?” she suggests. “Or maybe one of those Surface things. I’ve seen you looking at them…”
Every time she suggests this, I think about it for a long time. After all, not many wives would volunteer to buy their husbands an expensive toy. (And yes, I do have a great wife! That’s why I stay married to her!) But in the end, I wind up turning her down, because to me, that’s what these tablets are – expensive toys.
Now I’m not saying tablet computers like the iPad, Surface, or any one of the various Android-powered devices out there aren’t useful or convenient. The 195,435,004 people who went out and bought one of them in 2013 would seem to prove that. I’m just saying that at the moment, I don’t see them being very useful for me.
I don’t travel a lot and do most of my reading (and a good bit of my writing too) floating in my inflatable pool chair in the summer. So having my entire library of books and magazines at my fingertips isn’t as big a deal for me as it is for my wife, who does travel a lot. So if I finish a book or magazine I’m reading, it’s only a few steps to the house to grab another, while for my wife, who might be on a plane somewhere, grabbing another book from our bookshelves is a bit more problematic.
Also until they make those tablets completely water proof, I would not dream of taking one near the pool. If the book I’m reading gets splashed or I accidentally drop it in the water, I can fish it out, place it on the side of the pool to dry, and aside from some wrinkly pages go back to reading it within 20 minutest. Drop a Kindle, Nook, or worse yet an iPad or Surface in the water, and you’ve got yourself one very expensive paperweight.
I know you can do more with these devices than just read e-books. You can watch movies or stream videos from the Internet on them, e-mail, browse the web and even open and work on office documents. But I can do all that stuff on any one of my old laptops.
Even my oldest unit, an eight-year old Dell laptop with only 2gb of RAM can handle these tasks with aplomb and I find having a built-in keyboard much more useful than having to hunt and peck on an on-screen keyboard that offers no tactile feedback.
So for now, I can’t see spending money (or my wife’s money) on something that’ll I’ll only use until the novelty wears off then revert back to one of my old laptops because, to me, they are more convenient.
What would make me change my mind about getting one?
Well price would be always be a factor, so it would have to be cheaper than buying full-fledged, laptop. Right now, for the price of an iPad or Surface, I can buy a mid-range laptop that has lots more processor power and memory than any tablet on the market and wouldn’t limit me to just their simple apps. On a laptop I can run any software I already have or need.
It would also have to be rugged. As a tech, I’ve seen way too many of these devices get broken, and since they are not easy to fix and I’m a bit of a klutz myself, I’d want them to be able to withstand multiple drops from about table-top height without screens cracking or the electronics fritzzing out. Plus, they’d have to be water-proof, not just water resistant. I want to be able to drop one of these things in my pool and be able to fish it off the bottom five minutes later and have it still working.
Thirdly, I’d want it to have two screen modes: a high-definition color display for when I’m inside and an e-ink display so I can actually use it outside in direct sunlight. Kindle’s Paperwhite displays are great for reading books outdoors, and I’ve even seen some e-readers that can convert pictures into black and white so you can read a magazine page even with the sun shining over your shoulder.
But wouldn’t it be cool if a tablet could sense it was outdoors and switch to an e-ink display mode for your apps, so you can do more than just read outside? Yes, I realize this probably would not work for everything, but for writing and editing office documents, e-mails and even some basic web browsing, it should be just fine. And since that’s what I’d mostly be doing with mine…..
Finally, I’d want it to come with a stylus and an app which would recognize my handwriting and convert my scribbling into an editable text and save it to a .txt, .rtf or even .doc or .docx file. That way I could replace the clipboard and pencil I use when writing in the pool and get back the few hours it takes me to type all those pages into Microsoft Word on my computer.
Of all my requirements, I think this last one is most obtainable. There are a few apps out there that are close to doing this already. But until they prefect them and the other things I mentioned, I think I’ll keep passing on a tablet computer, and stick with my fallback gift: clamps.
Why do I want clamps, you ask?
Because a woodworker can never have too many vises.
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