From an ad Google sent out today for their new Pixel Tablet, where they’re plugging it as a hub for controlling “smart home” devices. At first glance, it looked like she was about to smash it with a hammer.
I suppose that says something about my attitude toward IOT?
(At second glance, it looked like a hummingbird sculpture on a post. At third glance I realized it was a houseplant.)
It’s weird to look back on all the posts I made agonizing about whether or not to buy a netbook.
It was never anything I would have used on a regular basis, and I knew that (which is why I never went through with buying one). It would have been something I used on trips, mainly conventions, and only to overcome the shortcomings of late 2000s smartphones.
Mainly: photos and typing.
It’s still painfully slow to type anything of length on a phone, but tablets have emerged since then and are a lot easier to type on. Hybrids like the Surface Pro and add-on keyboards make it even easier.
Touchscreens have solved the crappy trackpad problem netbooks had.
Faster phones and cell networks, and a more mobile-friendly web, have made a lot more things possible directly on the phone.
Netbooks, meanwhile, are pretty much forgotten, at least in the form they existed in at the time. Chromebooks are doing OK, at least in schools, but they aren’t quite the same thing. You’d think “netbook” would refer to something more like the network-dependent Chromebook, but it typically referred to the tiny form factor of a mini-laptop.
Looking back at the Tori Amos signing that I mentioned in the series’ first post: These days I probably would have taken the pictures directly on my phone and posted to Instagram within minutes. As for the blogging, I might have powered through on the phone and added the pictures directly, or I might have done so on the tablet and added the pictures that would already have synced from the phone over WiFi.
I wouldn’t carry a laptop of any size around the convention floor, that’s for sure. And I probably wouldn’t bring one on a short trip at all unless I was planning on working during the evenings.
For short posts, I’m actually more comfortable sitting on the couch and writing on my tablet than firing up my computer and sitting at my desk. This is something I discovered during NaBloPoMo. My workflow typically went like this:
What would send me to the computer are the things that are difficult to do on a tablet:
I’m not sure how much of that is the couch and how much of that is the fact that I’ve been putting off upgrading my home computer in favor of the devices I use more often. I finally replaced the ancient Nexus 7 with a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 a few months ago. (It’s awesome!) It’s FAR more responsive (the Nexus 7 was basically a proof of concept, and doesn’t deal with modern software very well), so I can actually use it for stuff.
Plus it turns out even at 8″, a 4:3 screen has a much better balance of onscreen keyboard and text area than the 8:5 screen did. Being able to see more of your document, even a little, has a surprising impact on how comfortable it is to write it.
The Nexus 7 Android tablet has been discontinued in favor of the Nexus 9. (via Slashdot.) I’ve had a Nexus 7 (2012) almost since the beginning, and while it’s showing its age, I’ve been trying to stretch out its lifetime, because I actually do still use it on a regular basis.
Most of what I do these days with it is reading. Email. Books. Comics. Feedly. Pocket. Some photo management and searching. My four-year-old plays games, most of which run fine once they’re up but they take forever to load. I’ve also started introducing him to photo editing apps like Pixlr and Aviary. I used to do more typing and web browsing on it, but it’s just gotten so slow that it’s actually faster to pull out my phone or go over to a computer. Katie doesn’t use it much at all because she has a Note, which is almost into tablet territory already. (She’s not alone. Since the iPhone 6S came out, Pocket has noticed that people with both tablets and phones use their tablets a lot less often if their phones are larger.)
But the 7″ tablet form factor is perfect to keep with you at the breakfast or lunch table, or kick back on the couch.
The thing to remember about the Nexus 7 is that the original release was a proof of concept. There were android tablets before, but the market was still considered something of a joke compared to the iPad, and Google wanted to prove that (a) there was a market for a good Android tablet, and (b) there was a market for a tablet larger than a phone and smaller than an iPad. The iPad Mini didn’t exist at the time, and Apple was still ridiculing the concept.
It succeeded. But they made some mistakes with the hardware that were corrected in the 2013 model. Unfortunately those mistakes have made the first edition notorious for slowing down.
Mine was getting close to unusable around the time Lollipop was released, and upgrading finished the job. Fortunately wiping it and doing a fresh install cleared up a lot of the problems, though as I’ve added more apps, it’s continued to slow down. Chrome is too slow to use, and while Firefox is a little faster, I basically can’t surf the web on the tablet anymore.
But for a core set of apps, it’s still useful. I’ll read/reply to email and skim Feedly in the morning at breakfast, saving items to Pocket to read later. Then at lunch I may read a book or catch up on those saved articles. Since Gmail and Pocket both work offline and sync in the background, I can still use them in places without WiFi. Mobile data would be nice, but offline+sync makes it less critical, and I’ve saved a few hundred over the last three years by not having an extra data plan.
I am going to have to replace it soon, but I can’t decide what with. I don’t want the larger size that the Nexus line is moving toward, and while I’ve been looking at Samsung’s Galaxy tablets, the models I’ve tried all feel a little too small or a bit too big. I don’t want a 10″ tablet, and I don’t want a giant phone. I want a device that’s just big enough to read a full comic book page on it, but still small enough that it feels like a paperback book.
Note: I didn’t actually post this when I wrote it. I’ve backdated it to the original date because it’s no longer timely, but I wanted it online so I could link to it.
Usability researchers like Jakob Nielsen have long contended that people read differently online than on paper: they tend to skim, follow links, and jump off quickly if they don’t find what they want. (Rather than being judgmental, Nielsen simply advises that you tailor your online writing to this.)
Now the Washington Post reports that people are observing a spillover effect, with online skimming habits interfering with concentration when it comes to more in-depth reading…even when reading print.
Sadly, the article mostly distinguishes between two modes of reading:
There’s nothing to distinguish, for instance, reading on a dedicated e-reader (without the siren call of Facebook or hyperlinks) from reading on your laptop. Nor is there anything to distinguish casually reading on your phone’s tiny screen from reading at your computer, or sitting on the couch and reading on a book-sized tablet.
Personally, I’ve found display size to be the biggest factor in maintaining attention. I get tired of reading on my phone, and I tend to skim on a desktop or laptop, but a handheld tablet (I have a Nexus 7, which is close to the size of a paperback book) works out about right. I’d much rather read a long article on that tablet than on a computer, even with the browser window sized for optimal column width.
So yeah, it’s much easier to concentrate on something long in a book than on a desktop or cell phone…but an ebook reader or a tablet is a lot closer.
There are still tradeoffs: My Les Misérables re-read changed drastically when I switched from a paperback to my tablet…not because I couldn’t concentrate on long passages, but because my method of notetaking changed. My reading actually sped up, but my commentary slowed down. (It did ultimately take me longer than I expected to finish the book, but only because I had so many other books I wanted to read, and ended up taking breaks and reading them instead.)
The main problem I do have with a tablet isn’t continuing to read, but starting to read. Even without a wifi signal, it’s tempting to catch up on email, or saved articles in Pocket, and before I know it, I’m done with lunch and I haven’t even opened the book I’d planned on reading.
(Via Phi Beta Kappa)
While reading about Amazon’s purchase of GoodReads, I noticed a link to an article about e-book discovery that points out that a lot of people tend to explore multiple e-book stores. As someone who has done that, I’d like to comment on my experience.
I didn’t really start reading ebooks until I had a device I could use. I don’t like reading fiction on a desktop or laptop computer, and I don’t like reading it on a tiny phone. A couple of years back, Katie bought a Kindle 2, which is just about perfect for the base use case of reading a book from start to finish (though it’s a pain for much of anything else — I imagine the touch screen on the Paperwhite line is a huge improvement). My first serious eBook reading was on that dedicated device, which is linked to her account.
Since I bought a general-purpose tablet last summer, I’ve branched out a bit. I picked up a few books on Google Play because they gave me some store credit when I bought the Nexus 7. At the time, a local independent bookstore that I like, Mysterious Galaxy, had a deal with Google where they could get a cut of what I spent.
I bought other books on the Kindle store, sometimes because of price or special deals, sometimes because of selection. Sometimes I’d even deliberately choose Amazon because the site where I learned about the book had an affiliate link, and I knew I’d be helping to support them. Mostly, I just like the Kindle reader app better.
At the start of the year, Google Play ended their deal with IndieBound. The new choice for independent bookstores seems to be Kobo. I’ve bought a few books from there after linking my account with Mysterious Galaxy, but I still don’t like the reader app much, and the service just seems…well…pushy. I’ve had to turn off a lot of “features” in the app. I don’t want or need recommendations in my status bar, thank you very much. And I sure as heck don’t need “accomplishments” to encourage me to read more. You know what encourages me to read more? Having time to read.
The result is that between the two of us, we’ve got a small library of eBooks spread across two Kindle accounts, Google Play and Kobo…on two mutually exclusive devices. (And that’s not counting the reference books I’ve bought from O’Reilly and saved to Dropbox.)
OK, so it’s not a huge deal now, but as we buy more eBooks, it’s going to get harder to remember which book is on which account when trying to look something up or reread. We already have to discuss how to buy books that we’re both interested in reading.
I like having multiple sources to choose from. Selection, price, being able to support a third party, these are all things that you don’t necessarily get with a fully-siloed approach. But with the way eBooks are handled right now, it does add barriers to finding things.
I would prefer the way digital music purchases work: I can buy from anywhere, download a DRM-free file, and then put everything in one place. It doesn’t matter whether I bought the music from iTunes, Amazon, directly from the artist, or imported it from a CD. There’s no question of where to go when I want to listen to it. (Well, until they switch to an all-cloud-storage model, anyway. The cynical part of my brain wonders if this is the real goal behind that trend.)
On the plus side, since the libraries are searchable, and three of them are linked to the same device, it’s actually an improvement over the years we were living in a too-small apartment with 90% of our books in storage, and it was a question of finding which box they were in.
I’ve been reading a Slashdot thread where people who don’t and won’t use tablets argue over why they don’t count as personal computers, because they supposedly aren’t useful for anything except consuming media (not that they’ve tried, I imagine, except maybe the 2 minutes they tried typing on an iPad that one time in Frys or Best Buy and didn’t allow themselves time to get used to the onscreen keyboard), and therefore can’t possibly have any valid use case. (And besides, if we admit that a tablet is a computer, then Apple wins!)
You can certainly make a distinction based on form factor. You can maybe make a distinction based on OS, but then you have to define what makes a PC operating system and what makes a tablet/smartphone/whatever operating system, and things are going to get blurry when you look at, say, Windows 8.
You can sort of make a distinction based on whether you can develop and install your own software, but even that isn’t hard and fast. You can write code in an editor. Compiling is a matter of whether a compiler is available, not something intrinsic to the device itself. Installing software from outside the walled garden is easy on Android, not so much on iOS. (Incidentally, this is the main reason I’ve chosen Android over iOS.) Both have large software ecosystems that developers can contribute to and the average user can install from, which is what actually matters to the average user. (The funny thing is, I remember plenty of arguments about how hard it is to install third-party software on Linux where the counter-argument was that with apt-get, you mostly don’t need to.)
But a lot of Slashdotters are spouting gems on the order of “It doesn’t have a keyboard!” OK, neither does your desktop until you plug one in. Which you can do with a lot of tablets. Or “It doesn’t have a mouse!” – Really? Are you serious? They’ve merged a trackpad with a screen. “I can’t upgrade the parts!” Well, that rules out a lot of consumer-focused desktops, doesn’t it? “PCs have applications, tablets have apps.” – Is there really any meaningful distinction between the two terms?
Pair a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with your tablet. Hook it up to an external monitor. Or don’t, since the typical tablet already has a better screen than an SE/30. Now you’ve got a workstation, with no more hardware than you would have hooked up to your desktop box. Install an office suite, an image editor, a coding editor — heck, a tax program. At this point the key difference in what’s useful is which applications are available. Wow, I’m having a flashback to all those old Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux arguments.
And yet people insist that these devices are “only toys.”
I still can’t get over the fact that a tech discussion site like Slashdot is so full of neophobes…but then they’ve always been. Look back at the “who would want a touch screen?” debates from a few years ago, or the “wow, this iPod thing is lame” initial reviews.
There’s a bubble a lot of geeks live in where they don’t think about other people’s use cases or workflows. That touch screen debate was full of talk about arm strain from vertical monitors, not considering horizontal or handheld screens, and not considering touch as a complement to keyboard & mouse. (My two-year old wants to touch the screen on the desktop and laptop, and I keep having to explain that they don’t work that way.) There are people out there who consider GUIs to be useful only for opening multiple terminals. And let’s not even get started on the decisions driving Gnome 3, eliminating things like files on the desktop or the minimize button because who uses those?
I learned my lesson when the iMac came out and I thought it was ridiculous. Who would want such a limited computer? As it turned out, lots of people…because they wanted and needed different things from a computer than I did.
So these days, when I see a piece of technology I can’t fathom the use for, I try not to rant about how useless it is. Instead, I wait and see what other people come up with. Sometimes it really is useless (though even the CueCat found a second life as a scanner for LibraryThing), but sometimes the failure isn’t in the technology, but in my own imagination.
