Amazingly, I won a tablet at work today; a Medion Lifetab (they sponsor us). Mr Lunduke seems to think that you can live off a tablet, which I really can’t see possible. So, for a week, I’m going to use nothing but a tablet and see if I don’t jettison it out of a window in that time.
Peace.
Awesome. I would love to see this as a daily diary entry on this thread. Interested in sharing? 
Yep, that was the plan - hopefully I’ll be disciplined enough! Last use of the laptop for the week here, showing that even though xorg is old, it still has cool tricks.
So far, running KitKat, I’m impressed at how much easier things are compared to my Andriod phone. Typing is so, so, so much more natural. I could actually see myself doing programming on this. Also the bigger screen, 7.85 inch / 19.9 cm (Lord knows who chose that size), makes web browsing much more acceptable. On my HTC One, if there’s not a mobile version, it’s a real chore.
Going well so far.
Super brilliant idea. A daily diary on how you’re finding it, the good and the bad, would be very excellent. And I’m confident that @bryanlunduke will have tips too.
Next do it with a 3g PS Vita xD
JKJK
Just try to have fun, I don’t think I could do it, at least not easily!
First full day is in swing. I’m sat on a Chiltern Mainline train, enjoying rurual Oxfordshire and my free 20MB (yes, megabytes) of free, “high speed” data. The biggest gripe so far is the lack of proper multi tasking in Android, which reminds me old the old days of CTRL+Z, fg, bg and jobs. I’d love to be able to watch a YouTube video whilst typing on a hangouts session. OK, so that may be a challenge because everything’s full screen, fine, but at least let me keep listening. This always bugged me on the phone, but with a tablet and prime device, it’s borderline unacceptable. Second big annoyance is the file managemnt, when I click ‘upload’ on a website, I want every file on the storage, not a collage of photos to choose from. Upside today is that I have a Go compiler and Python interpreter running, so I can still program. The little things…
Not used the tablet much today as I’ve been rediscovering the Suffolk countryside, with beer. The big(ish) screen is working well with apps that aren’t as nice on a smartphone. Maps, in particular, is much more of a pleasant experience. In terms of PC replacement, I can’t grumble today as I’ve only used it very lightly. For anyone in the UK, enjoy the storms tonight, they look great out of the window.
Despite today’s lack of actual things that need doing, keep this up. I look forward to tomorrow, or Monday.
Yep, I’m going to try to do one per day. So today has been pretty entertainment focused, I watched the F1 qualifying in the morning. The BBC iPlayer app seems very temperamental and doesn’t appear to steam in HD, like the full flash website. It’s quite nice than you can carry it around the house to do the morning chores whilst watching. The speakers aren’t quite as good as laptops though, obviously and, without a case, I have to keep propping it up everywhere. With a PC, I would have also have enjoyed a few minutes of gaming in the afternoon, so I popped onto the store and downloaded the GTA ports. I already had these, as I’d bought them for my mobile but, to me, they were always more of a gimmick than anything else. This seems to be enhanced somewhat with the bigger screen and I could actually see myself completing one of them.
I notice that I’m getting much quicker on the touch keyboard than I thought possible too, which is cool.
Chugging through the week nicely. Today was mainly using the web, in particular, to book a hotel. The browser is far more usable on here that on the smartphone cousins, anything that hasn’t got a lick of mobile CSS paint is usually doomed to fail. Here, however, everything is very usable; assuming that’s only due to the bigger screen. I thought I’d also try and write some software, today a basic web app. Unfortunately, it won’t build, so I’ll have to test it on a real host by SSHing from the tablet to see if it’s the build of Go on here that’s at fault, or if it’s my dodgy code. I purchased Juice SSH for my phone which, again, looks great on tablet. I’ll let you know how that goes tomorrow.
@joe @bryanlunduke
Hey, not meaning to hijack a thread, but since Joe is doing an Android tablet trial and Bryan uses one regularly, I thought you guys might answer a question I have.
I have done most of my postings on a PC. But once in a while I’m looking at the forums on my Nexus 7. Is there a way to use the ‘quote reply’ function, that is available on the PC, on the Android Chrome browser? That is a very handy function, but I cannot seem to find a way to use it on the tablet.
Thanks.
I believe (need to check when I get home), that if you tick “Request Desktop Version” in Chrome Mobile, you can use the highlight to quote feature. This will end badly on a smartphone screen, but should be ok from a tablet.
The lack of multi-tasking is really an app issue not an OS issue. There are plenty of alternative YouTube players that will float the player over another app. It’s just that the official YouTube player only floats the video window over the YouTube app, not over every app.
Most of the stuff you get out-of-the-box from Android and Google is pretty basic and you need to look through the Play Store to find alternatives with the features you want.
Which is pretty much the biggest advantage and biggest disadvantage: you have a lot of choices but you have to do a lot of work to find the one you like best.
I disagree, but it depends how you define ‘multitasking’. To me, it’s mainly an issue with the Android desktop environment, which only allows one full screen app at a time. There are even workarounds (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oryon.multitasking&hl=en), which I’ll look at tonight. The floating bubbles, like you see with Facebook Chat and Robin don’t work when some older (or poorly written) apps are in the foreground. The multitasking in Maemo was much better.
I gave up Maemo kicking and screaming. (Last Maemo-powered tablet was stolen last December.) To me it was damn near perfect as system that worked quite well as both a mobile “touch UI” and a desktop system.
Android does well in many areas. But it just doesn’t work quite as well as a desktop replacement as Maemo did.
Man, isn’t that the truth? After I spent some time on a 7" and 8" device… I just couldn’t bring myself to go back to a 5" (or smaller) phone screen.
Side note: Like what you’re doing here. It’s fun to experiment like this from time to time, eh?
Cheers man (also demonstrating that the highlight to quote works fine on tablets). I quite like doing this kind of thing. It’s the only way to get a real grasp.
Yesterday, I had a crack at getting my Go web app to run, but it seems that the implementation on Android doesn’t support it, which is a shame. I’ll move to Python and see if I find any more luck.
I also had a look at some multitasking apps, all they provide is a set on in built apps that float. I’d be quite interested if anyone knew what the plans are, Android wise, to support multiple windows etc. Even a tilting window manager would be a start.
I do also miss a terminal, especially one with root access. This may have allowed me to get Go working properly.
ARGGHHHH. I tried the request desktop version and couldn’t highlight anything. ARGHHHH!!!
Perhaps if I use a hammer? I’ll keep trying.
It’s quite temperamental, that took me a couple of attempts.
With my epic Golang failure yesterday, I’ve been running my most native language; python. Using qpython from the store, I can get quite a lot working, including bottle (for web apps) and kivy (for guis). I’m going to try and build a small app, using kivy, to see how frustrating coding becomes.
I didn’t have enough time to start anything fun last night, so I had a quick mess around with some of Google’s office apps. I remember when they came out and they were pretty unusable, or maybe that was just because I was trying on a phone screen. I have to say, now, I’m really quite impressed at them. The word processor, Docs, is a nice, clean working environment for writing. Although it does seem to lack some things that are found in the full web based version, such as inserting images. Same story for Slides, the presentation app. You can’t really make presentations without images. They do, however, both seem to render files that were made elsewhere (Libre, Microsoft) exceptionally well. Sheets, for spreadsheets is also nice, but lacks a lot of functionality you’d expect in that kind of software, including plotting and macro scripting.
To me, you may be asking a bit too much to expect to be able to make great content from scratch, but they are very useful for viewing and manipulating. I can see me plugging the HDMI lead in to show a presentation I’d made with Libre, knowing it’d look great.
