Until a few weeks ago I was possibly almost unique in the western world for never having laid a finger on an ipad in any sort of serious way.
Sure I'd fondled them in an Apple store, looked at them when people showed me documents and images on them, but I'd never used one or owned one.
Not that I was tablet agnostic - I bought myself an Android tablet in 2011, and while I've been through several since, for a long time they did the job - as a notetaker, for research work in public libraries, and a few other tasks.
While most people use a tablet to surf the web and check their email in bed, I mostly use a Chromebook - principally because it has a keyboard and I can write on it, so my tablet use has gradually declined.
At the same time, I've begun to listen to podcasts more and more, and I've got some reference material in pdf's which is mostly digitised nineteenth century directories (family history folks!) and so on.
And with it's sudden wifi wierdness my Pixi wasn't cutting it anymore.
So I bought myself a refurbished iPad mini. They're reasonably cheap, as a lot of them come out of point of sales devices, and since they've usually spent a large part of their lives in a protective housing, they're usually in pretty good order.
To it, I added the logitech canvas keyboard - they were on discount on amazon, I only paid around fifty bucks for mine, and that's given me a device about the size of an A5 notebook on which I can type, listen to podcasts, and do web based stuff, be it research or fun.
I've yet to use it for serious typing, but I've downloaded both a plain text editor and a copy of pages, and I guess I could always use Google docs if necessary.
What I can report is for scrolling through things such as the 1865 Scottish County directory - all 500 odd pages of it - iBooks certainly does the job better than anything I've found for Android, and of course one gets the Apple niceness - one suspects that some of the people who put the environment together wear ties and nicely pressed chinos - which after linux, windows and android comes as a pleasant change ...
Sure I'd fondled them in an Apple store, looked at them when people showed me documents and images on them, but I'd never used one or owned one.
Not that I was tablet agnostic - I bought myself an Android tablet in 2011, and while I've been through several since, for a long time they did the job - as a notetaker, for research work in public libraries, and a few other tasks.
While most people use a tablet to surf the web and check their email in bed, I mostly use a Chromebook - principally because it has a keyboard and I can write on it, so my tablet use has gradually declined.
At the same time, I've begun to listen to podcasts more and more, and I've got some reference material in pdf's which is mostly digitised nineteenth century directories (family history folks!) and so on.
And with it's sudden wifi wierdness my Pixi wasn't cutting it anymore.
So I bought myself a refurbished iPad mini. They're reasonably cheap, as a lot of them come out of point of sales devices, and since they've usually spent a large part of their lives in a protective housing, they're usually in pretty good order.
To it, I added the logitech canvas keyboard - they were on discount on amazon, I only paid around fifty bucks for mine, and that's given me a device about the size of an A5 notebook on which I can type, listen to podcasts, and do web based stuff, be it research or fun.
I've yet to use it for serious typing, but I've downloaded both a plain text editor and a copy of pages, and I guess I could always use Google docs if necessary.
What I can report is for scrolling through things such as the 1865 Scottish County directory - all 500 odd pages of it - iBooks certainly does the job better than anything I've found for Android, and of course one gets the Apple niceness - one suspects that some of the people who put the environment together wear ties and nicely pressed chinos - which after linux, windows and android comes as a pleasant change ...
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