A while back I was looking into getting an e-reader, but then discovered I'd probably get better value for what I needed through a cheaper-end tablet. I've been looking into getting teh 16gb BB playbook as I already have a BB phone for one thing.
I've been trying to find a retailer who sells both the tablet and a keyboard (RIM have just realeased one which looks smart if very small) to fit it, but no-one along Tottenham Court Rd seems to do both.

I wondered if any OTFers have one, and if, they can recommend a specific keyboard which is practical, but doesn't make carrying the things together unnecessarily bulky.

Feel free to use this thread as a more general tablet / iPad discussion. I just have this specific query.

Difficult to find, I'll bet. The Playbook's sales have been woeful. With iOS and Android being the only games in town (even if Android isn't up to scratch app-wise yet) Playbook accessories are likely to be t'internet only.
They seem to be going for anywhere between £60 and £80 online.

Incidentally, I just succumbed to desire and got myself a Sony Tablet S 16Gb. £299 - £100 less than the comparably spec'd iPad. Now there are a few things the iPad does better, but the big seller for the Sony is the SD card slot. I've whacked a 32Gb SD card in there (£15) and tripled my storage. So all the films\music\pics etc can go on the card and be swapped out when I want.
It'll also play more or less anything (despite being a Tegra II chip) and you don't have to use fuckingItunes to load stuff on.
Now, just waiting for ICS to launch on it tomorrow and it'll be all fine and dandy.

Do you have any gadgets that aren't made by Sony, Hobbes?

As for your query, Ivan, from everything I've read I'd steer well clear of the Playbook. They've fixed it now, but at one point it didn't even have a native email client. You know, the one thing that Blackberry is known for.

Also, if you're going to be getting a keyboard, can I ask why you want a tablet at all, as opposed to a laptop? What exactly are your requirements?

I picked up a Cloudnine Neuropad 2 from Amazon.

Link here

It also has an SD card slot and runs ICS. We stuck a 16Gb card in it and bought a USB keyboard for £8. It's great,and it's down to less than £90. It also links automatically to your Amazon Kindle account.

Anything will link automatically to your Amazon Kindle account if you install the Kindle app.

My father-in-law bought the Le Pan one running Android and he's as happy as a clam with it. We've had the iPad since it came out and Mrs WOM has to be surgically separated from it every so often.

My friend picked up one of those HP Touchpads when they were going for £99 and it was very good, I thought. They going for about twice that on Ebay and so on, but I'd consider paying for that, especially now it has been successfully been jail-broken to run Ice Cream Sandwich. Mind you, the old operating system was alright - it just won't be supported any more, I don't think.

Anyway, the Asus Transformer Prime sounds more like what you're looking for:

eee.asus.com/eeepad/transformer-prime/features/

I've had a play on one of those too, and thought it was really good. They're not that cheap though.

I'm probably getting a tablet later this year and will probably just get one of the older model Ipads. I won't use it for very much other than the internet, Twitter and so on, so don't need the latest spec.

Ivan Pykthallsev wrote:


You might regret this remark at the end of this post, and I apologise in advance for potentially derailing your thread and pooping on your party, but this seems the time and place to vent something I intensely do not understand.

There are plenty of things I do not understand in this world. I cannot see why women would want to have tattoos; it's a huge turn-off in my book. It seriously baffles me why North Americans are so reluctant to help their fellow men out a little (tax allergies and such), but let's have that discussion in another thread. And I am absolutely flabbergasted why anyone on this planet would like Lenny Kravitz, or prefer Oasis over Blur. But in my own field, I used to understand the world. You see, I work as a computer scientist. I'm generally fond of technological gadgets like these. But I cannot for the life of me understand how tablets could possibly have become such a success.

The thing is, I don't see a legitimate place for the tablet in the technological gadget food chain. It's dangling somewhere halfway between the smartphone and the laptop (or desktop computer, but let's treat those as the same for the rest of this post; this rant gets lengthy enough as it is). On the one hand, if you would want to do some proper work on your machine, I'd say the hardware keyboard and computational power make a laptop preferable over a tablet. On the other hand, if you want to do some more basic tasks on your machine, I can see why you would prefer the more intuitive input methods a tablet offers, but then a smartphone offers those basic tasks and intuitive input methods as well, and you can additionally make phone calls with it.

So what is it then? Could it be the bigger screen relative to a smartphone? The difference shrinks by the day. And then, is what you need the bigger screen for worth needing a separate phone? Or could it be the lower weight relative to a laptop? This problem has also been worked on lately. And is the weight reduction worth the loss of computing power and hardware keyboard?

The only thing I can clearly see being awesome about tablets, and it's really the only thing which sets them apart from smartphones and laptops in my book, is their insanely short boot times. Click on the button, and your tablet immediately works. I don't quite see how they haven't managed to get this working in ordinary computers yet, but it's definitely something one wants, and seeing it in your tablet is a pleasant experience.

Now, obviously the market has proven me wrong: people collectively want this. However, I cannot shake the idea that this might have happened purely by the following process. Apple releases this inherently flawed product. This being The New Apple Product, some gadget enthousiasts buy it anyway. Afraid to lose the battle, all other computer companies release their own tablet and market it to death, and ubiquity leads to success.

So please, fellow OTFers, tell my why I'm wrong. Explain to me why you love your tablet, and why it is infinitely better than a smartphone and a laptop. Enlighten me, to make me feel like I understand the computer world again, so that I can rant about mundane things like tattoos, tax, and music happily ever after.

I'm with you all the way. Except they're great for kids. Highly intuitive to use and they can't get toast crumbs in the keyboard and whatnot.

Of course they haven't been marketed that way — yet. Although in many ways childhood lasts all our life nowadays, so perhaps they have.

I bought a refurbished iPad 2 and a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard.

Was very sceptical about the iPad, but am now very fond of mine. I'll pontificate at a later point in time. The keyboard is very good by the way.

I have an iPhone. Although I've written Sony on the back in marker pen. (I haven't.)

I am admittedly a bit of a fanboy though. You could stick a Sony badge on a dog turd and I'd probably consider buying it. (Arguably they already did that with Vaios.)

Can you see why men would want to have tattoos?

Can you see why some women couldn't care less what you find a turn-on and a turn-off?

Oh, you're being a bit grouchy here, Ton Ton. He didn't argue for legislation banning women from having tattoos, nor for women to conform to his expectation of attractiveness. He said he doesn't find them appealing and doesn't understand the appeal of tattoos for women.

I'm looking at getting a tablet, for reasons of portability (I'm sick of carrying laptops on my shoulder all over airports while waiting for flights), and -- more than that, really -- to consume digital media. I'm not a fan of reading digital newspapers and magazines on the computer. I have a Sony eReader, which is OK (just about) for most books, but rubbish for those that have photos and sidebars.

Okay, here's my totally subjective two-bob's worth. I own an iPad 2, an HTC Desire and a laptop (of the desktop replacement variety). I'll also add that, while I don't think the iPad 3 represents good value, I do think a new or refurbished iPad 2 (16GB + wifi) does.

I do accept this debate is murky as we now have laptops, netbooks, ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones.

Instant-on
The last time I had instant-on was my Commodore 64. It's tremendously useful; how Microsoft got away with some of its interminable boot times I'll never know (although Win 7 is an improvement).

Battery life
The battery life on my iPad is something like eleven hours. You can genuinely use the thing all day with the wifi turned on; I often only recharge mine once a week. It makes it so much more useful as a device. With my laptop, I'm forever worried about the battery running out or whether I can find a power point

Size and weight
You can shove it in a shoulder bag without a moment's thought. Carrying around my work laptop (plus charger) is enough to give me curvature of the spine.

Versatility
This is the killer for me. Put it on a windowsill with TuneIn installed and it's an internet radio. I can put it on the music-stand of my keyboard and use it to read music. I've used it as an eReader, clock-radio, picture frame, cookbook, Skype client — all manner of things that aren't really practical with a laptop.

As a media device
The speakers and video playback are surprisingly good for something this size.

Gaming
I'm not a gamer, but a lot of people use them for gaming.

Touchscreen
The touchscreen opens up all manner of possibilities. For instance, I'm using mine a lot for music creation (e.g. GarageBand) and there are things you can do with a touchscreen that you can't do with a laptop.

Work
Contrary to what many people say, you can do serious work on an iPad. I do all my writing on mine now with the keyboard case and sync the files over wifi. There are several office applications available things like presentations, word processing, spreadsheets and WordPress.

The software ecosystem
Well, there's just so much of it.

I think Stumpy sums up the tablet experience pretty well there. The iPad is a great replacement for a netbook, it's way nicer to use than those plastic, compromised laptops are, does the great majority of things you would consider doing on a netbook and adds in a whole lot more too.

In terms of software, I have been particularly impressed by the range and quality of the photo editing / effects stuff and the music creation apps. It is indeed a serious work tool if you add in a bluetooth keyboard.

I have a third generation one now which solves the problem of the first one in terms of quickly switching apps - the first one struggled with not so much on board RAM. The only thing I find difficult is not being able to have two apps open side by side, but to be honest that defeats the purpose of the thing and is never going to be elegant on a 9.7 inch screen.

Yes, I think the iPad delivered what the netbook promised to (but didn't). I picked up a first-generation Acer Aspire One for £100 and, while I liked the form factor, the thing was just too underpowered; it would just hang all the time and basic functions — even switching tabs in a browser — took an age.

(Having said that, I put Linux on the netbook, installed XBMC, plugged it into the TV and it's now a rather good home media server.)

My lady went to a talk the other day about some chaps who did a big photography project, the vast majority of which was only available using a special app they had had built which allowed the paying customer access to... well, photos, video clips and blogs.

Suffice it to say the development costs were a five-digit number (and that doesn't include the huge cost of doing the photographic work itself), of which they recouped around 1% (the app only cost six dollars.)

Meanwhile, there's a bloke on the football forum here offering an incredibly interesting sounding magazine on Dutch football that is, helaas, only available for the ipad.

I'm not sure what the thinking is behind jumping onto a platform that is only accessible to a relatively insignificant sliver of your potential audience. Neither of these applications - caveat: regarding the football magazine I am presuming here - offer much that can't be done using a bog-standard website, so I'm at a loss as to why they've decided to restrict their potential market to a tiny sliver of people who own a specific device.

Is there much of this about?

I think that apps for websites will probably not last, unless the website is looking to bring in money. Responsive web design - whereby a sites design shrinks and morphs to fit whatever screen dimensions are being used - will see to that.

By way of example, we had Android, Iphone and Ipad apps in development for 200% for a few months. They were such a damn faff that it was easier to simply switch to a responsive web design (which, even if I say so myself, looks quite tasty even if it does mess up rendering embedded videos) and put that on the back-burner.

I'll probably return to it once there is something going on there that justifies charging people for it (ie, something above and beyond what is already on the site) and people who are desperate to give me money can always take out an Amazon subscription (they largely haven't so far, by the way). Meanwhile, the monetisation circle remains singularly unsquared.

But, you know, having researched the costings for advertising, having ads on 200% makes sense so I will get around to that, in the end.

My Name Is Ian wrote:


It's a difficult balance for the providers. An app may work beautifully, but if you're charging a subscription, 30% goes to Apple (who also won't let you have any subscriber data).

As a result, companies such as Amazon and the Financial Times have bypassed the App Store by making highly interactive applications that work in the browser. I do hope that more providers move in this direction.

I remember downloading the Guardian app for iPad, then deleting it, as the experience of the website in the browser was largely the same.

AdC inadvertently answered GY's question to me, up there. I don't have any major need or desire for a playbook or tablet of any sort; it's more for family use and my own occasional need to use for some note taking - hence the keyboard.
I didn't / don't want to spend a lot on it for this reasons, and already having a BB phone as well as the low cost for the Playbook was tempting. I'll have a further think, ta to all.

Carry on the geeky discussions [/luddite]