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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

As much as a I love the idea of a 7 inch tablet, there's just one thing that I really really use my tablet for and that's reading PDFs and old scanned comic books (guilty pleasure). The size of a ~10" tablet is more or less perfect for this despite the difficulties in handling the size of the device while in bed vs. a 7".

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I can see a 10" being a little too heavy to hold after a while. A 7-8" is at the right weight / size to hold with one hand then switch to another without getting to tired too quickly.

Browsing is tricky as clicking on tiny links take more work, I find I need to do a lot more zooming in on the 7".

Another advantage of many 7"-ers is they can charge from the USB port. If for some reason you also have your laptop with you, you can often plug the tablet into it and it will charge (albeit much slower than from the wall charger), most 10"-ers cannot do that.

I have to disagree on this. 7 inches are so much better when you want to read on the crowded NYC subway. I already tried with an iPad and it's a whole lot more inconvenient.

PDFs with images - ie, technical manuals or papers - still don't see it for a 7" screen. Reflow don't help much here.

The Nexus 7 has the same resolution that most 10" tablets have now, so why would you need reflow? Shouldn't everything look the same as on the current 10" tablets, just sharper?

It might be because my eyes are still young, but I prefer smaller screens with a high pixel density to larger screens with a lower pixel density.

>It might be because my eyes are still young

It is because your eyes are still young.

Even though it's sharper, that does almost nothing if the text is too small to read comfortably.. Cramming a PDF into a 7 inch screen is not going to work as well as on a 10 inch screen.

I have a Galaxy Tab 2 7" (which is a mouthful) and read a couple of Hyperink PDFs on it. It was not comfortable. Kindle books work great, and I presume the Hyperink ePub files do too.

I'm just concerned that the size of the text will simply be too small (regardless of DPI).

7" is definitely a good size for tossing in a courier bag/coat pocket though.

7" is damn portable. I need dedicated pocket in my bag to hold 10.1" tablet. I can put 7" tablet in any outer pocket or jacket pocket.

Do you ever take hand-written notes on PDFs? This is my killer-app, and I'm desperate to find a tablet that does it well.

I do not. My best guess is one of the Note Series might work for you.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-57385378-78/samsung-gal...

uPad on the iPad works pretty well for me for this though having tried a few different apps I quickly became aware that individual workflows and requirements vary massively for the seemingly simple requirement "taking notes on pdfs".

http://www.appsafari.com/notes/16761/upad/

Have you used a tablet with a native stylus? I have heard that the iPad's capacitive screen doesn't handle this so well.

I've got a cosmonaut stylus which I'm pretty happy with on the iPad.

Broadly speaking I don't like a the idea of a tablet with a stylus as it would be better for a small number of use cases but worse for a far larger number.

The screen doesn't handle detail brilliantly for handwriting but uPad gets round this by giving you a larger writing area which it then shrinks onto the actual document. Basically you write an inch high and it crunches it down to about 40% of that. It works pretty well, though I'd still use the keyboard for significant text input - it's completely workable once you get used to it.

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