For the first time, I went on vacation leaving my NetBook at home and took my tablet with its new keyboard case to see how it would do. When on vacation, the time available to write drops (because you’re there to see the people, right?). However, when everyone retires for the evening or it’s early morning, you can either write or watch TV (guess my choice).
What worked with the tablet-keyboard combo was the “instant on,” and that’s turning out to be the tablet’s chief advantage along with a lack for “support software” like virus scanning, defragging, and optimizing. The keyboard was relatively nice to work with, and as it’s Blue Tooth, only a couple of key-presses were wasted getting it to “sync-up.”
What didn’t work so well was the lack of an actual mouse. Touch screens are great, but that little mouse-driven, arrow pointer on the screen is a lot more accurate than my adult-sized finger. I found myself keyboard-bound for editing, and a little hampered still because some relatively common buttons are missing (page up, page down, for example). The real miss didn’t become evident until I came home and tried to get what I had written back to the PC. Mr. Tablet’s software refused to bring the new material back to its mother-ship program on my main computer, so I had to cut and “e-mail” (yes, sad, isn’t it?) the changed portion to myself. To add insult to this, a few days later, Mr. Tablet’s software finally got around to bringing everything back to the desktop. Too late, bud.
My final appraisal (for now) is that the tablet and keyboard combo are good for travelling, but they have too much overhead and too many limitations to be replace the NetBook for now. Perhaps with some fine tuning or other programs, but as for now, the NetBook is where it’s at, at least for me.
Progress on “Purebred” continues, another 40+ pages added on vacation (see, I did find time after all!). Better still were all the things outside of writing that happened. Take care all!