No Tablet For Me… yet

Tablet

I don't have a tablet. They all look really, really cool when you see them, and they're great fun to play with: you can spend hours finger drawing, playing games, flipping through a book, surfing the web…

Then reality sets in: I don't need one. I've got a compact, light laptop with a keyboard. I've got an Android smartphone that lets me check email, surf the web and fits in my pocket. There are few situations where a tablet could realistically replace either.

A tablet doesn't fit in your pocket. You need a bag — and if you have a bag then you can bring a laptop. The laptop is vastly faster, with way more memory and storage. A larger screen, a real keyboard and a full operating system that lets me do long-form writing, software development and data analysis among many other things. A tablet isn't a replacement for a laptop and won't be for many years, if ever.

Unlike a tablet my smartphone will go in my pocket and still does most things a tablet could: surf the web and do email, read books, play games and so on. And it's also my phone; it comes along whether I bring anything else or not. A tablet isn't a replacement for my phone either.

I'm not alone it seems. I see plenty of notebooks, and everyone and their dog carries a phone. But for all the hype, I see precious few tablets out in the wild. A tablet is still a rarity during my commute. I have only seen half a dozen people in total trying to use them for serious work - showing presentation slides, taking notes, drawing illustrations during a discussion, that sort of thing. I don't think I've seen anyone do it twice. It really is mostly a toy, not a serious tool.

But for a toy they tend to be heavy and expensive. Many tablets are the size and weight of a large hard-cover book — too heavy to hold in your hands for very long, and large enough to be jostled and bumped in a crowded train. The purchase price is high and the monthly contract — usually required — on current tablets is almost as much as I pay for my phone subscription. Fine for a tool, but it's too much money for a toy.


But — what if it was so cheap you could buy one on a whim? What if it didn't need a monthly subscription? What if it was so small and light that you could actually use it as a decent text reader?It'd still be a toy of course, but an affordable one, and one with an actual use.

As it happens, there's a very interesting tablet just about to be announced. the Andy Pad Pro is a British-made¹ 7-inch — about 9x15 cm — Android tablet with good specifications and a seriously low price. It's fairly fast with a higher-end ARM cpu and 3d graphics hardware, a decent amount of memory and storage and a 1024x600 pixel capacitive touch screen. There's a standard(!) USB port and a HDMI port for full HD video output, and both front- and back-facing cameras. Good specifications, far better than budget tablets. It should let me run any application, read PDFs and books, and play any kind of game.

Apart from the specs, there's a few things that set this one apart: First, it's open. The system is unlocked, so you can replace the supplied Android 2.3 with another version or another OS if you want. And they hope to update it to "Ice Cream Sandwich" — the next version of Android — once it's publicly available. The company has been really responsive when I've emailed them, and I hope and expect they will continue to be responsive and open in the future too. I'd love to see some documentation on the hardware and drivers on the website for instance.

Second, the price is good. At £179, about 21000 yen, it's cheap enough that I can get one just for fun. At that price, and being open, I can find good use for it no matter what. If I end up not using it as a tablet, I could try running another kind of Linux on it; use as screen and controller for some project (could make a great replacement server for my homebuilt temperature logger - and its little brother is almost so cheap you could get one just for that); or simply use as a development target when I get the urge to develop for Android again.

Oh, and third: it looks nothing like the glass-and-aluminium tablets that's all the rage right now. It doesn't copy anyone else, but has a simple and straightforward design that's quite appealing to me; I can carry this around without a feeling that I should wear a turtleneck sweater, hornrimmed glasses and an arrogant sneer. And I'd be far less worried about dropping this than dropping one of those easily scratched tablets with exposed glass corners.

On the down side there is no mobile connectivity, only Wifi. The battery life will probably be a bit limited, and the screen is unlikely to be as bright and contrasty as more expensive units. The developers have surely cut corners elsewhere too. That's fine; I don't expect to get 50k yen worth of hardware for less than half the price.

I'm ordering one next week, and I'll be back with my impressions once I've used it for a while. Hopefully I'll receive it before we leave for Sweden later next month; a week-long trip should be a good test.

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#1 Let's hold off on the "But does it leak oil?" jokes. It's the birth country of the ZX81 among many other iconic microcomputers after all. The ARM processor family — at the heart of almost all smartphones, tablets and netbooks among many other items — is developed in Britain too. The British computer industry never died; it just became embedded.