@crusader8463 said:
I bought one not long ago myself, and after playing around with it for 2-3 days I just took it back. Maybe you will have better luck, but I couldn't find any apps on the store that were worth messing around with. Every game I tried just felt like a bad flash game that cost money and was unable to hold any appeal beyond 5-10 minutes. The only thing I found it good for was reading Comic Books and watching videos online when I had to take a shit. Which is not worth the price tag in my books, but everyone puts their own value on money and leads different life styles.
For me, the ultimate selling point on finally caving in for a tablet is that I'm tired of dragging a 17" macbook all over the house when I still need to remained tethered to the office. With a $20 VNC app on the iPad, I can just bring that along - whether cooking in the kitchen, taking a break on the patio, or taking a nap downstairs. And with the battery life and the fact that it can sleep to extend life (whereas shutting my macbook to extend battery life will disconnect my from my VPN into the office) is useful, too.
Because I am typically on-call (meaning, urgent within-minutes response necessary) for between 13 and 72hrs straight at a time (seriously), that laptop was becoming a nuisance as a solution to avoiding sitting at my desk all day/night.
But beyond that -- and having a more convenient way to read some stuff on on my SafariBooks account, I didn't have a whole lot of pre-planned use for it. :)
So far, it seems the password solutions suck (lastpass is fantastic, but awful on the ipad and 1password is terrific on OSX/iOS, but terrible everywhere else). The browsers kind of suck (plugin and other support for other browsers are limited or gone and Safari only allows eight tabs -- and of course negates all of the stuff I have synchronized on chrome, which I use absolutely everywhere else that I can).
@GrantHeaslip said:
If you're a reader, you might be surprised at how pleasant high-DPI tablets are for reading. Obviously Kindle (and iBooks?) is where you'd go for books, but if you want to read web content, look at Pocket or Instapaper, which both scrape web articles and render nice paginated copies of them.
@c0l0nelp0c0rn1 said:
The kindle app.
You don't need facebook for words with friends anymore.
One reason I never figured I'd bother with a tablet is that I couldn't imagine reading on one versus e-ink, but it works surprisingly well, for reading. Granted, the battery life is incomparable and long-term reading may be less gentle on the eyes, but I've resigned to consuming audio books via Audible for entertainment (fiction, biographies, etc) and technical content in written-form -- so it should balance out.
I've been looking at Readability, which I've used for years -- but it looks like all the mobile version does is replicate instapaper-style service rather than being an always-on utility that I can bookmark content for later with from within the browser on the tablet, itself (though maybe there's an option for that in one or more browsers, too). I need to look into Read It Later, which I've been using for ages (I guess it's called 'Pocket' on the iPad).
One frustrating thing is that every damn thing being an app and no real multitasking existing means that there's always a limitation to functionality. I need to find something specifically for RSS feeds (which used to just be google reader in the browser), Something else for a quick "here's some stuff you meant to get around to reading", etc. (Though a lot of things can be resolved by forwarding them through RSS feeder options and consume it all there, I guess). And then, of course, some of the better applications on iOS may not have a counterpart on the desktop (to maintain state in RSS feeds, as another example).
It seems functionality on iOS is still a slave to battery efficiency.
@laserbolts said:
Porn and lots of it.
Well, that's what Plex is for. :)
Run Plex on the server for on-the-fly transcoding of the 30+ terabytes of porn to any device on the network (roku, computers, tablets, phones, etc). Oh, and the GiantBomb channel on Plex. Just don't get those confused or you'll end up jerking it to Jar-Time.
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