Tabula Rasa - Bonus Round
So my last unemployment threw my upgrade cycle all out of whack, leaving my desktop from 2005 only just replaced earlier this year and me not having done my notebook upgrade yet, which it needs as it is failing and now out of warranty. Normally, when I go on vacations, I like to spend my free time relaxing and working on things on my notebook. Given its state, it wasn't going to be the best of ideas for my vacation to San Diego this year. Now, in the mean time, this year I made the jump into smartphones with my LG Quantum, so I thought perhaps I'd try something new this year: tabula rasa - clean slate, as in a slate/tablet device as partner to my smartphone, clean and progressive operating from the cloud. So, thanks to the gracious lending of a Viewsonic G Tablet device by one of the Notebook Forums members, I went to California with WP7 in one hand, and Android in the other.
One of the biggest problems the tablet market has is finding somewhere to fit. People have powerful phones, and powerful desktops, and the tablets fit in an in-between that most people don't need. My main desire for them is an actual need for a middle bridge, where my phone doesn't give me enough space for what I need to do, but it would be too inconvenient to boot up my computer to do the task. A tablet, for me, would be a good idea, which is why I went for the idea. Now it worked... somewhat. WP7 operates on SkyDrive, and thanks to the SoRaMi client Android can sync with SkyDrive. QuickOffice on Android allowed me to work with my documents in DocX format (which I needed to convert things form ODF to in order to use in Office 2010 on WP7). However, at the end of the day, the idea didn't pan out so well in practice, for one particular reason: typing.
I will make note that up until now, except for a few additions to the above paragraphs, I typed that all on my phone. And I can do with my phone what I could not do with the tablet, because the LG Quantum has a hardware keyboard. I grew up typing on Commodore 64 and IBM Model M keyboards, and I am a touch typist, I don't look at the keyboard to know what I'm typing, except when I need to replace my hands (I didn't learn to type with the "home row" system, my hands instead move rather differently, so I need to reset myself when I move my hands away or I end up typing all sorts of gibberish as my hands are going through the motion on the wrong keys). With my phone, I have the feedback of the keys being pressed, and can feel them under my fingers to know I'm in the right place. For all but the simplest things, I use the keyboard instead of the softkeys, because for me it is faster. But with the G Tablet, there was no such benefit for me. I had to look at the keys, or else I would miss. And that's with the special split keyboard the ROM I was using had (VEGAn-TAB GingerEdition), I imagine the regular keyboard would have been even worse for me to use.
And that's the way it goes. I pretty much got no writing done the whole trip, because I just could not function with that soft keyboard. I need the feedback in order to type, I need to feel what and where I'm pressing. So now I'm left with a decision about whether to move on with getting a tablet or not. If I do, at the very least, I will need some sort of keyboard attachment to do serious work on it, such as the dock for the Eee Pad Transformer (which is what I was planning on getting before this mess came up). For your amusement, if you want to see how bad it was, you can click on the following link to read the previous entry as I wrote it on the tablet, giving up on trying to correct things: http://www.regularspelling.com/images/blogentry.txt
Date posted: 24 August, 2011 Tags:
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