I parted with some money 2 years ago and bought myself a tablet. My wife – the most un-high-tech person on this planet said, “Greg, you need to get one of those. The world is changing and you need to know what’s going on.” Just one many reasons why love her.
So I bought the tablet and a little keyboard that somehow connects to it. I brought it home, and …
Well, it pretty much sat here for the past two years. I used it a little bit. It has a larger screen than my cell phone so I can look at email when I’m traveling. But the problem is, when I’m traveling and I want to use the tablet to look at email, I have to dig the tablet out of my backpack, power it up, and wait. If I have to dig stuff out, I may as well dig out my reading glasses and use my cell phone for email. Or if I’m stationary for a while, why not use my laptop for email. It’s a richer experience anyway.
It didn’t help that a few months after I bought this tablet, it lost its 4G cellular connection and I had to send it in for repair. But a curious thing when it came back – I was in no hurry to load any apps on it.
And now the latest – I charge it up under a bedside table, next to my cell phone. I like my electronics close by – it’s an occupational hazard. I haven’t used it in something like 3 months. Until a few days ago, when I wanted to use it as an ebook reader. So I turned it on and… it hung. It won’t power up. The battery is fully charged, but it hangs at boot time. Fiddling with buttons to reset it back to factory settings are useless. It has a hardware problem, probably stemming from when my 2 1/2 year old youngest grandson jumped on it while trying to climb on his grandpa.
So for the past few days, I’ve been struggling to figure out the right replacement strategy. There are some **nice** tablets out there. I can spend less than $200 for something decent, all the way up to $1000+ for a top of the line model, with something like 800 or so price points in-between. The available tablet choices are amazing.
But here’s my dilemma – why? After two years, the only app I care about that the tablet does better than any other electronic device is read ebooks. Everything else either works better on a full fledged PC, or the portability of the phone trumps the larger screen size of the tablet.
I may not be alone in my dilemma. Apparently, the decline in PC sales is reversing as tablet sales decline. And unless I can find a compelling reason to invest in a nice tablet, I’ll probably just get a cheap one to use as a book reader.
Oh – and that keyboard I bought 2 years ago? I never unpacked it out of its cardboard box.
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