I've been thinking about getting one lately, maybe for note taking or web navigation when I don't really need to code.
Do you use one? Why? Why not? And if so what model do you recommend?
1. Music production/performance. The iPad does few things objectively better than Android and touch responsiveness when it comes to playing music apps is one of them. There's a 100-400ms delay with Android for some reason. I had heard they'd gotten better recently but my girlfriend just got a Galaxy S5 and even though it's a last generation phone it's unplayable for being on time.
The iPad has a lot of great emulations of older synths and exciting new apps that aren't available anywhere else. Some big names have also made apps, like Korg, Propellerheads, and Native Instruments. Check out iPolysix, iProphet, Animoog, DM1, Auria, E.L.S.A., Beatsurfing, Impaktor, BIAS Amp, Audiobus, Swoopster, Sparkle, Galileo, Thumbjam, Steel Guitar, Arpeggionome, Orphion, Xynthesizr, Glitchbreaks, Loopy, and Gadget.
2. A second monitor. Duet Display lets me plug in my iPad as a second monitor to my MacBook. This is convenient for coding on the go.
3. Casual laptop use replacement. About the only thing I can't do easily on just an iPad is code or write a lengthy bit of text. If I bring a Bluetooth keyboard I can conceivably do the latter. Possibly the former but I hear the coding apps are still "meh". But if I travel lightly and I want to read, answer email, check the news, play music, or watch some videos, then an iPad suffices over a laptop, and I don't need a heavy power brick. If I want better speakers I can either use headphones or a Bluetooth speaker. If I want a bigger screen there are converter cables or apps that let me do that.
I've been looking for similar software for Android tablets for ages but everything I've tried so far were laggy and unstable.
I'll probably end up getting an iPad just for Duet Display if it works as advertised.
Do you write actual songs on it or rather just work out some melody or beat or so? Just asking becasue I cannot imagine doing the former, especially handling sequencer-style ui's on a tiny screen with touch seems problematic.
I use it mostly as my guitar amps, guitar effects, and drum machine. I have a lot of synths on there that I sequence with a separate app or have someone play with at MIDI keyboard controller. My new favorite thing is to get Xynthesizr (sequencer) in random mode but in a certain key to talk to a synth app and have that be a background bleep-bloop thing that is every changing while I do heavy reverb and echo drenched ambient guitar stuff.
I love my Windows tablets! They're so much more powerful than devices running a locked down mobile OS!
I might replace it with a "tomorrow m5" phone; a feature phone the size of four stacked credit cards.
1. Reading. I love reading the old, free PDF books available from Google books and archive.org. The OCR doesn't work well, so you really need to read the original scanned image version, which requires a big screen and a fast enough processor (a phone or older model tablet won't cut it). I also moved from using my Kindle to the iPad for reading ebooks, since it is much faster to thumb through the repetitive parts of non-fiction books using the iPad.
2. Playing games with my girlfriend. Our favorite date activity is going to a bar or hanging out on the patio, having a drink, and cooperatively playing some trivia or puzzle game on the iPad.
I previously had a Nexus 10, but it was too slow to read scanned PDF's and it crashed all the time. The iPad Air 2 is much, much better.
To me, modern tablets seem like toys, except maybe the Surface pro (expensive). I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and barely use it. The screen is uncomfortably small for taking notes, and the note taking software is exceedingly basic compared to the 13-year-old Windows Journal (which is itself quite basic, like a notepad for pen-input, but powerful enough to take decent notes and making drawings).
I've never tried Windows Journal though, so I'm not sure which features I'm missing out on. S-Note could definitely be improved more.
In journal you can specify your own background; I like little squares to draw and take notes rather than college-book style lines. In S-Note they pre-defined a few paper templates, and the only thing that comes close ('idea notes' or something) uses a beige back-ground, which looks ugly when putting on a webpage. Thus I use an imagemagick script to fix those (cumbersome).
Journal makes it a bit easier to manage notes, they live in a proper file system; pages within notes are easier to manage (that page-management sub-tool in S-note is very cumbersome). Journal allows searching in notes based on text recognition, per file or per folder.
I found exporting easier with journal, but that may just be because you are on a proper operating system where you can copy and paste quickly; on the Note the normal modus operandi for copying seems to be to 'lasso' stuff, which you can't put on a website nicely (images are rectangles, not hand-lassoed loops).
Is there a way to update S-Note? (If not, that could be sort of another complaint: lack of updates)
You can change the notes background, including to backgrounds saved in your own image library. So you could create your own forms to fill in, but there's no guidance on how to design those background images. They're now a mix of Paper (background color/texture) and Pattern (eg repeating lines for writing on, or grids / dots for graph papers).
S-Note files are also in Android's file explorer, but I don't know of any program that can open them. You can export to PDF. Text searching is via Evernote, and I'm not sure its handwriting recognition is reliable with S-Note. Page management is still a pain. There's an option to convert your lasso into a square now & save it to your Scrapbook, but it isn't as easy as a crop tool.
I don't think there's a way to update S-Note, unless Samsung updates the whole tablet (ie to Android 5). Frustrating! The new S-Note would make your Note 8 much more powerful if there's a way to hack it onto there.
Actually I couldn't find the new galaxy tab in 8" with the pen, only the 10" is available with pen on Amazon.
Is the text searching possible among multiple notes (e.g. a folder, or multiple folders?)
The new S-Note is indeed better, I appreciate the copy/paste/resize features. Gotta make a graph paper template (cumbersome). So thanks for the hint!
It's still not as good as the more than ten-year-old journal. One can zoom to only 200%. And the drawing is pretty laggy (if you draw slowly at max zoom, it updates like 2 times per second). Laggy drawing makes good penmanship very hard, and drawing accurately painful and slow.
It's also odd that the app overrides the screen brightness to full, and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it from doing so.
At some i began to feel like I needed an in betweeen device and a tablet which is essentially a bigger phone was not the answer. Enter the Asus chronebook flip. Its a thin 10 inch chromebook with a touchscreen that flips all the way around and becomes a tablet. It seems to fill that void. Once Google opens up the ability to install more android apps on chromeos, it will be even more useful.
For when I want to "produce" things, I grab my 13" mbp pro.
Actually I have always both, my ipad and my macbook, in a bag with me.
Bonuspoint for developers: the iPad can serve DashDoc remotely when coding on your mac! :D
It comes down on what "producing" means for you. I am a developer. Yes, I can code even on my iPhone (code editor, ssh client, git client is installed), but i'm much more productive on an actual mac.
If you're kinda office worker that uses mainly office software (word, excel, ...) and messaging (mail, slack, ...), an iPad with optional keyboard is perfectly capable as a primary working device, plus it's extremely portable and may even have mobile data plans attached.
Right now I have a tablet that can be used with or without its detachable keyboard. It was given to me, so I have nothing invested in it. Aside from the obvious uses of surfing and note taking, I've got iPython Notebook on it. That's become my primary "terminal" for most of my technical work these days, so I can't live without it.
In all due honesty, I'll have to admit that the motivation for having iPython Notebook on a tablet, is to occupy myself during meetings. I've settled on not trying to compose big codes, but use the time to learn more about Python and general programming by surfing the web for cool tutorials and interesting new packages.
A tablet seems to be pretty much the biggest thing that I'm willing to actually carry around. The keyboard has the drawback of requiring me to have a horizontal surface to put it on. My little Moleskine notebook still wins for note taking.
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I had an iPad for a few years and then sold it somewhere around 2013. I just didn't use it enough, because my laptop was so much more useful for what I was doing, which was mostly coding and writing emails.
I have a Kindle now, but am honestly thinking about selling that too, if only because the DRM really freaks me out. It's so much easier than lugging books around, but I've never had to charge my book and it won't disappear should Amazon go out of business one day.
I was going to say that I don't have a "tablet" anymore, but then I realized I have a Galaxy Note 3 for my personal phone, and that's a tablet compared to pretty much any phone before it.
The thing made me nervous when I bought it because I was worried it was going to be too big, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It's big enough for web browsing, even for a guy with terrible eyesight like me, but I can still toss it in my pocket. I'd feel like a tool if I did that with an iPad, and I can't figure out why. It's totally normal to see someone fiddling with their phone in a waiting room or on line at the DMV or something, but an iPad looks silly in those situations, for whatever reason.
One downside to the "phablet" revolution: When someone calls me and I don't have headphones handy it looks like I'm holding an LCD TV to the side of my head. But I spend way more time staring at this thing than talking on it anyway.
Notice any drawbacks to it, after using it a while?
As a workstations I don't think they would suit most computer dependent roles.
I'd say overall they are great to have and use mine a bunch, but they're a luxury not a necessity. If you can afford this level of disposable income Id say get a reasonable one and try. Cheap ones tend to lag from reviews and disappoint from performance. If your budget is tight Id put the money into a more quality laptop/phone. Also cost wise tablets tend to last longer than phones in my experience. If you buy a decent one you might get 4/5 years out of it vs 2/3 for a phone.
I'm sticking to iPads for the moment. I use Android and Windows phones so definitely not a fanboy. I would be open to a cheaper Android/Windows if they have improved tablets UX but last Android one I used 12+ months ago didn't seem to work as well as the iPad.
It has replaced all my loose paper notes. It synchronizes handwritten notes with Evernote, so I can search across all my devices. I use it to take notes while on the phone or during web conference calls. I also use it to write notes while reading Kindle, though Kindle doesn't work in split-screen mode yet. My other uses are Pocket, Duolingo, Toodledo (to-do list), but I could do all of those on my phone. I am dying for a decent Project Management app that works on a tablet with the S-Pen.
Before that I had a Nook Color running Cyanogenmod, but I never used it except to test apps. Pocket wasn't a compelling enough use case; the S-Pen is what made a tablet compelling for me.
edit: i very much prefer my kindle to read books, and for everthing else i still use a laptop or a smartphone..
My opinion is that for reading and simple point and click stuff it is ok. Whenever I try to write a little more text than 3 - 8 keywords on google or to chat with people, it gets slow and wonky.
But last year I bought an iPad to replace by broken Kindle. Between reading and deciding to put more consumption apps on it and stop using those on my laptop – Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc. – I started to get more use out of it.
In the end I have a tablet out of convenience of separating leisurely activities from work ones. Other than that it hasn’t provided significant value for me yet.
- read HN or Reddit, an app with reddit and safari with HN, it is nice to be on the couch and do the same thing I would on my chair
- play games: hearthstone a card game like magic, a tablet is the perfect medium for it.
- read technical papers or CS books in pdf, the best way to read rich text book with being distracted.
- a DJ app with spotify integration, nice UI, tactile feeling, and quite fun for parties
I had an Nexus 7 and I hated it, I really like the ipad last gen.
There's the possibility of rooting it, which I'm looking into.
I think making it easy for users to root / reuse devices would help drive sales to new devices by providing a more vibrant second user market.
However, I hadn't used it long, and I'm thinking about selling it. A good device for consumption, but I always have a computer near me (at home or work), so useless for productive work. And I can read on my computer too. And play games.
IMHO the iPad is the best at what it does, especially if you have Apple HW lying around.
I'm guessing you have the iPad 3 (the 'new iPad'), which had significantly better specs than the iPad 2 (along with a better screen, I think).
EDIT: Just realized I wrote "iPad Air 2", instead of just "iPad 2 3G".
I have one in the garage that I use as a Sonos (whole-house music system) controller and to occasionally look up shop-related queries (IE - "what is the torque spec on the axle bolt for my bike?").
I have one next to the couch that is also a Sonos controller and I use for weather and "2nd screen" duties. IE - "Why does Con Air's cinematography style look so much like Michael Bay movies?"
I've got one in the home office I use for hacking, many other gadgets I use have tablet-based interfaces.
I have a retina iPad on the nightstand for reading, checking the news/weather/sports/social networks and to control my house lights - part of my bedtime routine.
My most compelling use though is for when I need a light computer for travel. Two years ago, I went to Hawaii for a week on two carry-on bags (including big camera and diving gear). I had my iPad with me and, while there, work had a serious server outage. I was able to SSH into the server, initiate repairs, and get everything fixed while sitting on the balcony in the sun. I did not carry (and could not have fit) any normal sized laptop in the carry on. I also used to it check out various tourist destinations and find places to eat while I was there (which I could have done on a smartphone, true).
I'm an extreme geek, I have embraced the culture of technology, my house is filled with many gadgets that have served me well and others that have served only to drain my bank account. I have no hesitations about buying something if I have even the slightest inkling that it would improve my life/workflow.
In the above, all but the iPads were cheap Android tablets that I dont think I paid more than $200usd for (none of those needs required a whole lot of horsepower).
To speak to your specific interest, tablets are awesome for casual web navigation and almost awesome for note-taking. I have yet to duplicate the ease and awesomeness of a pen on paper for note-taking with any tablet app/stylus combo. Many tablet note-taking apps have great features, but the actual 'feel' of a quality ballpoint pen on wood pulp has yet to be duplicated - for me, I've spent far too much time being 'constrained' by computers to be able to think as freely as I can with a pen and paper. Switching will almost certainly be a painful adjustment. That said, if 'computers' are your native medium, then note taking on a tablet can be a powerful thing.
For example, Microsoft OneNote is an amazingly awesome note-taking app for computer-savvy folks. They really nailed the balance between digital data entry and analog notation while presenting it in a fairly intuitive interface. I've only ever used it on PC, I'd love to see as brilliant an implementation on a tablet. Not sure it's possible without a mouse-'mindset' interface.
Though really, as long as you don't need big horsepower and aren't on an extremely constrained budget, it's not too hard to get your feet wet in the tablet world cheap. I just saw a not-horrible import Android tablet for <$40 on a sale site.
At the time of writing this comment, at least 10 comments in this thread were grey. There are a lot of comments in this thread being downvoted for no particular reason - moderators, what's going on?
Thanks for your hard work and for a perfect response, as usual!
You should definitely email that kind of thing to hn@ycombinator.com, because then (a) we're guaranteed to see it, and (b) it won't dilute the threads.
If you really want to see how petty people can be, try being a Microsoft fan around here.