Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?
Everyone around me seems to have a tablet these days. I have never used one and I don't see the need to.
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?
89 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadTo 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.
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.
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.
I love my Windows tablets! They're so much more powerful than devices running a locked down mobile OS!
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
edit: i very much prefer my kindle to read books, and for everthing else i still use a laptop or a smartphone..
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?
If you really want to see how petty people can be, try being a Microsoft fan around here.
Thanks for your advice, but I find that shoving people's bad behavior right in their face by doing things back to them is a much more effective tool against assholes than just letting them be.
That is not a legitimate way to use Hacker News. Neither is downvoting a good comment because of someone else's bad comments. And I'm dismayed to see that several of your recent comments here have been uncivil.
Please don't do these things. If people behave badly because other people do, what hope is there of improving this community?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
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.
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.