I was wondering, do you have a tablet?
I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab A8, 128GB/4GB Pink Gold. I previously had a 32GB/3GB Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 in Dark Gray, but I almost ran out of space, so I decided to get a tablet with more storage. Since my daily device is my phone (Samsung Galaxy S21+), I don't think I need a flagship tablet as well since I mostly just use the tablet for streaming and the YouVersion Bible app. Unless you are into gaming or photo editing, most people I think just buy high end tablets for bragging rights.
I have an iPad - I tried using a small-ish Android tablet that I got for free from Verizon many years ago, but, between the fact that I owned an iPhone and the fact that I don't know how to use Android devices (and can't be arsed to learn), I went with the iPad.
I mainly use it for streaming and video, though, and it's far from the highest-end iPad available.
I don't.
My wife and I talked about getting her one. I had my doubts; she decided she wanted it. Some time later, she got rid of it since it wasn't worth it.
Yes.I have an iPad. Easier to look at than my iPhone, but not as portable.
I had an iPad for a few months, then I sold it. I don't really need a tablet. It doesn't do anything my phone and laptop can't do, all while being one extra unnecessary gadget to carry around.
No, but I have a laptop that can be used as a tablet. I never use it as a tablet.
Quote from: index on August 19, 2022, 01:07:52 PM
I had an iPad for a few months, then I sold it. I don't really need a tablet. It doesn't do anything my phone and laptop can't do, all while being one extra unnecessary gadget to carry around.
I mainly use my tablet just for streaming and using the YouVersion Bible app. A larger screen for these purposes is a nice perk, while being much more portable than my laptop. These usages don't require high-end hardware, and since I don't use my tablet every single day unlike my phone, I didn't think it was necessary to spend the money on a high-end tablet. However, the mistake that I made with my Galaxy Tab A7 is that I bought one with only 32GB storage, which wasn't enough (a lot of the storage was taken up by the OS). I would recommend at least 64GB minimum, with 128GB being optimal. This is why I decided to sell my A7 and get an A8 with 128GB.
I have two iPads, one an older model and the other a newer one to replace it. I particularly like the larger screen for reading documents when I'm on the Acela or similar so that I don't have to pull out a laptop. If I want to type more than a small amount I'll use the laptop (too many typos using the iPad), but for reading I prefer to use the iPad.
My boss has an iPad Pro he loves, but that device is rather large for my taste. He has weak eyes and says he appreciates having more screen space for zooming in further.
I have a laptop and an XL screen phone. A tablet seems like it has the worst of both of those items.
Bought an iPad about 10 years ago or so. I figured that it would work well for travel since it would handle email and web surfing.
Nowadays, after all these years, it does not get much use. It is functionally obsolete, yet I haven't bothered to replace it. I found that it is just as easy to travel with my MacBook Pro in tandem with my iPhone. The MacBook can do all that my iPad does, and much more. Also has a better display and keyboard which is important as my visual acuity and my finger dexterity are both not what they used to be (being in my 60's).
I can see the iPad shining over the other two if trying to do work on a flight, but to be honest, I prefer to just take a nap while flying :)
I won an iPad in a contest at work about 10 years ago. (We were given a series of innocuous pictures and asked to identify which of the company's facilities each one was taken at. Fortunately, I had taken the time to visit several of them in person and could pick out the differences in the decor at each of them pretty well.) During the time that I used it, I mostly used it to watch YouTube videos in bed. I also used it as a cash register at a couple of trade shows I went to. I stopped using it when YouTube demanded an upgrade to a version that couldn't be installed on that iPad. (Which seems stupid to me, why couldn't I just keep using the outdated version? It is not like I was doing anything but watching videos; I wasn't uploading or commenting or anything.)
Since then, I haven't had a working tablet. I don't miss it much. Having the bigger screen was nice sometimes, but doesn't justify the expense of buying another one. I'm also a firm believer in having an actual keyboard, and I have a laptop, so it's pretty easy to push simple tasks to the phone and more complex ones that have to be mobile onto the laptop. So a tablet is in sort of a grey area where it doesn't really solve any problems for me other than...watching videos in bed, so I can have a biggish screen without lugging my laptop in there.
Someday, if I have a bunch of extra money sitting around, I might buy another. But if I do, it certainly won't be an iPad. The experience of using an iPad taught me that I absolutely hate iOS and the design philosophies underpinning it. Lots of things that were simple and straightforward to do on Android were next to impossible on iOS, because Apple apparently never contemplated a user wanting to do what I wanted to do, and their obsession with making things "simple" meant that any workarounds were walled off. It made using it enough of a chore that half the time I'd just do stuff on the phone I could have used the tablet for. And it was annoying to have to carry to deal with an entirely separate set of cables than the ones I already had for my phone. Also, this was old enough that the iPad had a headphone jack; if it hadn't had one I probably wouldn't have ever taken the thing out of the box, since all of my headphones are wired. I don't really have much interest in buying any wireless ones and having to worry about batteries.
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 19, 2022, 04:17:59 PM
I won an iPad in a contest at work about 10 years ago. (We were given a series of innocuous pictures and asked to identify which of the company's facilities each one was taken at. Fortunately, I had taken the time to visit several of them in person and could pick out the differences in the decor at each of them pretty well.) During the time that I used it, I mostly used it to watch YouTube videos in bed. I also used it as a cash register at a couple of trade shows I went to. I stopped using it when YouTube demanded an upgrade to a version that couldn't be installed on that iPad. (Which seems stupid to me, why couldn't I just keep using the outdated version? It is not like I was doing anything but watching videos; I wasn't uploading or commenting or anything.)
Since then, I haven't had a working tablet. I don't miss it much. Having the bigger screen was nice sometimes, but doesn't justify the expense of buying another one. I'm also a firm believer in having an actual keyboard, and I have a laptop, so it's pretty easy to push simple tasks to the phone and more complex ones that have to be mobile onto the laptop. So a tablet is in sort of a grey area where it doesn't really solve any problems for me other than...watching videos in bed, so I can have a biggish screen without lugging my laptop in there.
Someday, if I have a bunch of extra money sitting around, I might buy another. But if I do, it certainly won't be an iPad. The experience of using an iPad taught me that I absolutely hate iOS and the design philosophies underpinning it. Lots of things that were simple and straightforward to do on Android were next to impossible on iOS, because Apple apparently never contemplated a user wanting to do what I wanted to do, and their obsession with making things "simple" meant that any workarounds were walled off. It made using it enough of a chore that half the time I'd just do stuff on the phone I could have used the tablet for. And it was annoying to have to carry to deal with an entirely separate set of cables than the ones I already had for my phone. Also, this was old enough that the iPad had a headphone jack; if it hadn't had one I probably wouldn't have ever taken the thing out of the box, since all of my headphones are wired. I don't really have much interest in buying any wireless ones and having to worry about batteries.
If you want a tablet just for basic entertainment such as streaming and web browsing, go with an inexpensive Samsung or Lenovo tablet. The average user doesn't need an expensive tablet for most use cases except photo editing or gaming. Some people just like to buy high-end tablets for bragging rights.
Maybe someday. As it is, though, the amount of money I have to spend on things like that is less than $0 at the moment.
Advil :bigass:
My grandfather has an iPad Pro that is almost entirely used by my grandmother to play various puzzle games. The massive screen is quite useful for them in their later (80s) years as their vision slowly gets worse.
She hogs it enough that he up and bought a MacBook Air a couple weeks ago, just so he had something to use; he had an iMac but it was a very base model and seriously slow, so he sold it a while back. He's quite happy to have a physical keyboard for emails.
I have an "old" iPad Air which gets used for work about one week a month, and is good for finer controls of making music than anything else. I can get some light work done on it on weekends when I'd rather leave my laptop at home. It's nice that it's ready to look something up right away compared to the task of logging in and booting a PC, like an online restaurant menu.
But with a larger phone, it's less necessary than before. The keyboard is less user-friendly and intuitive than my phone's, and it stores less (understandable since it's five years older). And it doesn't seriously edit real photos and there's no file structure to manage, everything has to go to the cloud.
Work paid for it but the idea that it would be "out of date" is ridiculous, so I probably wouldn't buy my own. I suppose if I did more tablet-based tasks, I'd appreciate it enough to purchase one. My son really likes his Samsung tablet but my daughter and wife use their iPads a lot more infrequently.
I'm still a PC guy; the 10-year-old Surface I tote around most other times still handles file backups, has a USB port, and almost everything I need an iPad to do, though a lot more clumsily than anything else. I only use the attached keyboard since it's used as a mini-laptop, or as a docked PC when working from home. I'm still amazed I get 3 hours out of the battery and the processor is fine for handling 2-or-3 tasks at a time. I've been dragging my feet on a new laptop since I'm waiting to see what new laptop work will give me in the next 12 months.
Surprising yes, my wife bought it for me years ago to watch movies on planes. It's an Amazon branded something, does it job and doesn't give me trouble. If it broke I probably wouldn't replace it myself.
Yes. In fact I'm actually using a 2020 iPad Pro to type this.
Quote from: Max Rockatansky on August 19, 2022, 09:10:00 PM
Surprising yes, my wife bought it for me years ago to watch movies on planes. It's an Amazon branded something, does it job and doesn't give me trouble. If it broke I probably wouldn't replace it myself.
Does it have Android on it or some sort of Amazon software?
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 19, 2022, 09:36:21 PM
Quote from: Max Rockatansky on August 19, 2022, 09:10:00 PM
Surprising yes, my wife bought it for me years ago to watch movies on planes. It's an Amazon branded something, does it job and doesn't give me trouble. If it broke I probably wouldn't replace it myself.
Does it have Android on it or some sort of Amazon software?
Amazon I believe.
Quote from: Pink Jazz on August 19, 2022, 11:28:25 AM
Unless you are into gaming or photo editing, most people I think just buy high end tablets for bragging rights.
If you're so much into gaming that you need something high end to play said game, you'll go for a PC. Same for photo editing.
Quote from: Max Rockatansky on August 19, 2022, 09:40:13 PM
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 19, 2022, 09:36:21 PM
Quote from: Max Rockatansky on August 19, 2022, 09:10:00 PM
Surprising yes, my wife bought it for me years ago to watch movies on planes. It’s an Amazon branded something, does it job and doesn’t give me trouble. If it broke I probably wouldn’t replace it myself.
Does it have Android on it or some sort of Amazon software?
Amazon I believe.
AMZN devices generally use a locked-down, forked version of AOSP Android. However, Play Services and Store can usually be sideloaded on most of the company's tablets, as well as most APKs. YMMV tho...
I inherited my child's ipad to try out. I basically decided I didn't like it. I type reasonably well, a whole lot better than I do making squiggles on a screen with a stylus or my finger, so I really want a laptop, not an ipad.
I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab A that I inherited from my former neighbor, who died three years ago at the age of 97. Her daughter had it configured as a GrandPad while she was still living and reset it to the factory configuration before passing it on to me. I use it primarily for light Web browsing (including reading news articles), exchanging Messenger PMs, reading ebooks, consulting agenda packets when I am in meetings, and so on. It is easier to carry around than a laptop, and with a Bluetooth keyboard I can also use it for notetaking and other forms of light writing. However, my real workhorse is a Windows gaming laptop.
Though I have tentatively determined the tablet was manufactured in 2017, I have no idea how its specs compare with others of the same vintage. I've backed away from using it for certain types of Web surfing because it is slow to render ad-heavy pages on the screen, which results in false taps where an attempt to press on link A instead loads link B. It would be easier to use if it had an ad-blocking HOSTS file (I use MVPS' HOSTS file on all of my Windows PCs), but to install one I would have to root it first, which is not a trivial task.
Quote from: LilianaUwU on August 19, 2022, 09:58:32 PM
Quote from: Pink Jazz on August 19, 2022, 11:28:25 AM
Unless you are into gaming or photo editing, most people I think just buy high end tablets for bragging rights.
If you're so much into gaming that you need something high end to play said game, you'll go for a PC. Same for photo editing.
My brother got an iPad Mini for dealing with photos while traveling. He likes to camp and didn't want to bring a laptop.
Technically, yes. But it's a Surface Pro 6 that usually has a keyboard attached to or is docked using a Surface Dock. So I guess I'm kind of cheating. :-P
I did use it a lot for note-taking, especially during my early college years, often times using the pen, before I reverted back to using old-school paper by the end. I really like the Surface line. This is the second Surface Pro I've owned and used, and I think they've been solid, premium* products. I've had my SP6 for a few years now, since before COVID, and I don't see replacing it in the near future.
When it does come time to upgrade, I might go for a more traditional laptop since I don't think I'll be note-taking much anymore, given I've graduated from college. If I could spend lots of cash right now, I'd probably get a traditional form-factor laptop and pick-up an iPad on the side for casual tasks. I have to admit, I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy that actually prefers their simple take on UI compared to Android. I use an iPhone and Apple Watch, so to have an iPad would admittedly fit in nicely.
* I say premium because I understand Surface devices are expensive, but you get good quality for the price.
Quote from: JoePCool14 on August 20, 2022, 07:42:28 AM
I have to admit, I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy that actually prefers their simple take on UI compared to Android.
My experience with the iPad has taught me that the "simple" part is only true if the assumptions the Apple devs made about how you are going to use the device are correct. If you step outside of the limits of their imagination, things get complicated really quickly.
My go-to example was when I was trying to set the home screen background to a picture of my company mascot, a dragon. The whole thing wouldn't fit on the screen, so I wanted to set the top third or so of the image as the background, which would include the dragon's face and wings. On Android this is straightforward; after selecting an image, you are taken to a screen where you are given a box you can drag around the screen to select which portion of the image you want. On iOS, however, it "simplified" things by not giving you this option at all, and arbitrarily selected the middle third of the image to be displayed, so I now had a headless dragon stomach as my desktop background.
I eventually had to work around it by taking a screenshot of the portion of the dragon that I wanted displayed and setting that as the desktop background. I'd say that while the intent was clearly to "simplify" by reducing the amount of interface presented to the user, it definitely did not simplify things in actual practice, because the Apple devs were not imaginative enough to conceive of a situation where a user might not want the edges of their picture cropped off.
Yes, it's a 2017 iPad.
At the same time, I would not go with a table that is too cheap either from some unknown off-brand. For most users, a Samsung A-series tablet or a Lenovo M10 Plus 3rd Gen should do the job just fine.
As for tablets vs. laptops, the key is portability. Tablets offer larger screens than phones yet are much more portable than laptops. Many enjoy playing games or doing photo editing on the go, and this is the reason why higher-end tablets exist. If you are traveling on an airplane, a tablet is so much more comfortable to use and easier to carry than a laptop.
Quote from: Pink Jazz on August 20, 2022, 06:54:41 PM
As for tablets vs. laptops, the key is portability. Tablets offer larger screens than phones yet are much more portable than laptops. Many enjoy playing games or doing photo editing on the go, and this is the reason why higher-end tablets exist. If you are traveling on an airplane, a tablet is so much more comfortable to use and easier to carry than a laptop.
I disagree–for me the key is input precision. If the device isn't precise enough for me to do what I need to do, it doesn't matter where I can take it because it's just dead weight.
If I am doing something like consuming media (text or video) then a tablet is just fine. I don't need to interact with the device very often, and when I do, if my input is off by a dozen pixels or so, that's not a big deal.
By far, the most common thing I use a computer for is to create something, though, usually either vector graphics or text in 300-word chunks. I'm fairly sure that making someone create vector graphics with a touch screen (which often involves very fine nudging around of Bézier curves) is against the Geneva Convention. And it would take me three times longer to use a tablet to write a 300-word item than the amount of time it would take on my laptop (which still takes longer than the amount of time it takes to slam one out on my 1988 IBM Model M keyboard).
Hell, I don't even know if there even
is free vector-editing software capable of producing SVG files on iOS or Android. I certainly doubt there's something with a comparable feature set to Inkscape. One of my best friends draws raster graphics on his iPad using an Apple Pencil and some sort of software from Autodesk, and while he produces good-quality work on it, he runs into a lot of baffling technical glitches, like the alpha channel randomly getting discarded, that I've never had Krita on my laptop do.
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 20, 2022, 05:28:31 PM
Quote from: JoePCool14 on August 20, 2022, 07:42:28 AM
I have to admit, I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy that actually prefers their simple take on UI compared to Android.
My experience with the iPad has taught me that the "simple" part is only true if the assumptions the Apple devs made about how you are going to use the device are correct. If you step outside of the limits of their imagination, things get complicated really quickly.
My go-to example was when I was trying to set the home screen background to a picture of my company mascot, a dragon. The whole thing wouldn't fit on the screen, so I wanted to set the top third or so of the image as the background, which would include the dragon's face and wings. On Android this is straightforward; after selecting an image, you are taken to a screen where you are given a box you can drag around the screen to select which portion of the image you want. On iOS, however, it "simplified" things by not giving you this option at all, and arbitrarily selected the middle third of the image to be displayed, so I now had a headless dragon stomach as my desktop background.
I eventually had to work around it by taking a screenshot of the portion of the dragon that I wanted displayed and setting that as the desktop background. I'd say that while the intent was clearly to "simplify" by reducing the amount of interface presented to the user, it definitely did not simplify things in actual practice, because the Apple devs were not imaginative enough to conceive of a situation where a user might not want the edges of their picture cropped off.
I think that's true, and I guess I don't mind it since I don't try to go too crazy with how I use my Apple devices. I've never really had any serious thought of jail-breaking my iPhone, for example.
I guess I'll buck the trend of tablet naysayers. I use my tablet more than my phone and home PC combined. Almost every AARoads post outside work hours is from a tablet. My first tablet was around 2013-2014 when I won an iPad mini from a raffle. After using that a while, I got a Samsung tablet (forget which one). Eventually I dropped it and the screen shattered, so after using that for a while, I decided to get a Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (my current one). My only complaint with the Samsung ones is the lack of a headphone jack, so I have to remember to keep the dongle around. Otherwise I love the bigger screen than a phone and it's way more convenient for my general uses (AARoads and Reddit) than a laptop. Actually, it's arguably too convenient and it's easy to spend too much time on it.
I've personally never understood internet browsing on phones/tablets. I usually queue up a ton of tabs and then cycle through them, so the phone/tablet interface doesn't work as well for me. While staying at my Aunt and Uncle's house in the Thousand Islands last year, I figured the greater portability of a tablet would have been more convenient than trying to find places to use my laptop, but whenever I think of trying to do a full forum check on a tablet interface I back down from the idea. Plus I have more control with a laptop, and they don't fall out of software support like phones/tablets do (I run Linux, so whenever a version hits end of life, I just upgrade to the next, and my current hardware has never had issue with that).
^^^^^
I'm reading this and posting from an iPad and I have 21 browser tabs open at the moment (some to remind me of things, some like this forum that I leave open, and some that I just haven't gotten around to closing).
I don't. I have nothing a tablet can do that can't be accomplished by my phone or laptop.
I got a Kindle Fire tablet a couple of Amazon Days ago, on a whim.
I like it better than my phone as an eBook reader, and it's OK for light surfing. I'll bring it along, primarily as an eReader, for quick trips where I don't need my personal laptop, or for when I will be camping in a parking lot while my wife is in a doctor's appointment or is shopping. (She doesn't drive....)
I have an iPad and have also been issued an iPad for work.
Last year I bought an Onn (Walmart house brand) 7" Android tablet for use as a music player to replace my iPod Classic. It proved to be a tad too big for easy vehicle use, so my wife uses it to stream YouTube music while she's working at her home business. I bought a cheap $20 Android Tracfone that will accept a 256 GB card for my music player.
I have an Amazon Fire HD 8, but don't use it much as I also have an Acer Aspire 5 laptop.