Status of using tablet

Yesterday was another high wind day in Idaho Falls so we ate out and walked the Grand Teton Mall. Rick from 'Rick and Paulette's RV Travels' recently blogged about the desktop/laptop vs tablet issue so we thought we would share our status of using a tablet as promised earlier. We recently bought an Asus Eee Pad Transformer for Bob in addition to the Kindle Fire for Jo. Bob also has a smartphone, an Android Droid 3 from Motorola.





We got the detachable keyboard which works good when we want to type a blog entry or a long email, although it is smaller and it is taking some getting used to. When we are playing games or reading email and typing short responses or reading books we can just detach the tablet from the keyboard and use the onscreen keyboard.





Like we said the tablet for blogging works pretty good but we are having trouble adding photos - get some screen flashing but cannot select photos, this is why some previous posts have been photo free just after we got the tablet. You can also only get so much in the text block when blogging which has helped to shorten some of our postings. Al from 'Travel with the Bayfield Bunch' recently posted some blogging tips here which included shorter posts making it easier to read and we try to adhere to that but sometimes the area has so much to offer we try to cover everything. We have gone from one big report on an area to breaking into a post for each particular visit we made while in the area. This has help to shorten our posts but there is still a lot of info on some of the sites that we go to. There are also some web pages that don't work well on the tablet's browser but we ran into that before where some sites would need Internet Explorer instead of Firefox so web page compatibility is not a new issue.


Bob keeps track of what to see in both Google Docs and Google Maps and the tablet works real well for Docs and pretty good for Maps. There are free apps for word processing and pdf reading so that is covered too. We honestly can do about 90-95% of what we want to do with our tablets and Bob's smartphone. Having the same apps on the phone as the tablet means that we will always have the info at our fingertips even if we don't have the tablet with us. Buying the tablet has allowed us to get rid of one of our laptops so now we have just 1, the two tablets and a smartphone. Since we still occasionally use the laptop we are not sure about switching away from Quicken for our finances as we are creatures of habit and it would be a fair amount of work to get everything switched over. One area that the tablet is best at hands down is when we want to got outside the tablet is much better for ease of reading, in fact we never took either of the laptops outside. Another advantage of the tablet is that with Jo's Kindle most of the books she has are also available on the tablet.


Maybe we are more of a futurist than some but we can see the day when the tablet will replace the desktop/laptop as the main computing device. There are just a few more what you would call desktop applications like Quicken that will soon become workable apps on the tablet and the existing apps will get better and more memory will be added. As far as we are concerned the screen size is OK the way it is now with the enhanced user interface allowing you to zoom by finger tip. But the day that you will no longer need a laptop or desktop is not now, but it is probably 1-2 years away. For now we enjoy what each of the devices do best.


Till next time,


Bob and Jo