iCame iSaw iPondered

[crazyscot]

From time to time I contemplate the notion of a tablet PC of some sort. Yes, yes, I know, Apple's offerings positively exude a level three glamour, but I do hear rumours of people out there who do serious useful stuff with them. As a tool for getting things done, in other words - not just a plaything. But Apple's blurb proclaims there to be over 250,000 apps in the App Store. Right. How on earth am I expected to navigate that?

Of course there is the other option, of a much cheaper Android device, but there is such a profusion of devices to choose from, and no single unified App Store, making the problem much worse. (Side note: commodity hardware is dead.)

What, dear readers, might I do with such a device? What do those of you who have them do? (I also have some notes from folk at work.)

There is also the question of 3G or not. My lifestyle doesn't currently put me in situations where I think "hey, if I had 3G and a tablet right now I could do X", so I don't see much utility in paying the extra - but of course this is a chicken and egg situation. What can I do with a 3G device that's useful, cool or both? I appreciate that you can't answer for me, but you can at least tell me about cool stuff that you'd do, which is hopefully going to give me ideas...

(Side note: I have a PAYG 3G stick; I don't currently see the benefit of a 3G subscription. Casual data is eye-bleedingly expensive here. The least awful rate I have found is with Telecom NZ, who charge $1 for the first 10MB in any 24 hour period, then $1 per MB after that; and if you go a-roaming, then (in most parts of the world) thirty bucks per MB is what they will be a-charging. If RevK is reading this paragraph, he's probably had kittens by now and/or spotted a market ripe for exploitation. But griping about mobile data rates is not (really) the purpose of this post.)

Comments

[ewx]

My main uses for my phone's mobile data (or small tablet, depending how you look at it) are fairly standard online computer uses - email, lj/twitter/etc, web, SSH - but from anywhere; plus navigation. It gets used for ebook reading too but that's much less dependent on cell data connectivity.

It'd be much less useful if it was actually the size of things actually sold as tablets, since I'd be less likely to have it with me all the time.

This corresponds to about the last week. The G+ and Tumblr data usage figures are rather disproportionate considering how much I actually use those apps.

I have a £10/month subscription with a data limit higher than I ever reach.

[ewx]

no single unified App Store

I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind with that remark. Apart from manually installing the occasional Humble Bundle game I use only the Google store (“Google Play” as it is now called) and I wasn't aware that there was anything else comparable to it for Android. I've yet to encounter any indication I'm missing anything at any rate.

[crazyscot]

The point is that you can get your apps from anywhere, so there's no single catalogue; and do aspiring app authors publish?

[ewx]

Err, well, you can get them from anywhere but I’m not clear what problem you think this causes. If you want a wide choice in a single place then the Google store is just that.

[crazyscot]

I wasn't aware of Google Play, ta.

I think the root of my perceived problem is finding the killer app that makes my life complete, for suitable values of killer and complete. If they're all in one place then I can at least do targeted keyword searches for whatever goat-floating app I think I want, provided my search-fu doesn't desert me. If they're simply out there on the net, the finding problem seems harder. The notion of browsing a single app store also appeals, though the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of apps out there already doesn't...

Deciding what it is I want from apps is an orthogonal problem.