woodwardiocom | Tablet Opinions

That's a concern for us, too. My main personal use for a tablet would be to avoid carrying ten or twenty pounds of GURPS books to games; I'd want to be able to read them comfortably on the screen. . . .

I mostly use tablets for games, poking at stuff online, and reading ebooks. (The kind that's mostly text.) In that area, I prefer smaller ones strongly; less weight in one hand when using them like an ebook reader, enough space to play Plants Vs. Zombies just fine, enough space to look at LJ and Tumblr one post at a time without squinting. But it really depends on what you're going to be using them for, I think. Aside from tumblr, and being annoyed when trying to read websites, I use my phone about the same way.

I can hold a 7" tablet in one hand; I can’t hold an 11" tablet in one hand. I use my tablet mostly for reading books, and for games that require more space than my phone. I haven’t encountered anything for which I wished my screen was larger.

I had a 10" tablet and it’s collecting dust because it was too large and heavy to use comfortably for reading. (Come to think of it, you can have it if you want it, or borrow it if you want to see if a larger tablet will work for you. The size isn’t the only thing wrong with it, though; it has a screen that only really works for a very narrow set of angles and doesn’t work very well in portrait mode. And I bet it’s on the heavier side for tablets of that size.)

Thank you, I'd love to borrow it!

iPad Air! ^_^

More seriously, it depends on what you want a tablet for. If you want to read PDFs with minimal scrolling, then I would say you want a bigger tablet. (I haul my iPad 1 -- the real 1, the original 1 -- around all the time under my arm, in its nice frictiony cover. I wouldn't hold it up in the air a lot, but there are a bazillion things I can prop it on.) If you get an iPad of some stripe, you also want to shell out the cash for GoodReader, because it has some lovely cropping abilities for PDFs. Personally, I would rather read PDFs on something iPad-sized, not iPad mini-sized, even with a retina display. The letters are clear, yes, but they're still small. Webcomic/comic-app reading, ditto. Bigger is better.

If you want to play games, you want a responsive tablet, but I suspect 7 vs. 11 doesn't matter very much. (Unlike tablet vs. phone, say.)

If you want to read ebooks and don't want to be propping the thing up on stuff, you want lighter -- which will tend to go with smaller, but you may want to heft your choices and see if any of them are secretly packing really heavy batteries. (Or just drag the phone to bed; I read a whole book t'other day, in bed, with the text in night-mode (white on black), half under the covers. O:> )

If you want to write, then try to test a text-app on it. I discovered, to my annoyance, that writing on Pages for the iPhone scrolls the text back and forth as I write, rather than having a "fit to page" ability. I don't know if other otherwise-decent text apps would do that particular trick, but if they do, you want something that will have a decent text size without zooming in so it has to scroll back and forth when you type. If you don't expect to have a keyboard-cover, I would go with a bigger "scree-board" for easier hitting-the-keys -- though a responsive scree-board that's smaller may trump a larger, less-responsive one. ...I advise getting a bluetooth keyboard so you can use it at least sometimes, if you want to write on your tablet.

If you want to web-surf, then it depends on screen resolution and screen responsiveness. If you want to watch stuff on it, you care about screen resolution and aspect ratios a little. Again, try 'em before buying; some of the cheapest tablets are... perhaps not really the best screen resolution. I will say... I would rather watch a movie on my iPad 1 (no retina screen) than on my retina-screen iPhone. I don't know if the 7vs11 would make as much difference with movies/YouTube as the padvsphone4S does, though. The more people sitting around the couch to watch movies with you, though, the more you want A: a bigger screen, and B: one that doesn't have issues with different viewing angles. (I just finished marathonning the Korra Book 2 season with the kid, cuddled together on the couch.)

...any of that help?

My wife and I find 7" too small for reading pdfs and most webpages. Just too much constant zooming and scrolling. For reading properly formatted ebooks they are great.

Our Nook HD+ (9") on the other hand is great for reading most pdf (if the text was already smallish there can be some zooming issues, that'll depend on your eyes.) We find reading in landscape on the web just fine on almost all sites. It's usable in one hand, particularly if you can rest one edge on something, if you need to hold it out or at an odd angle it can get tiring and you may have to use a second hand to hold and scroll at the same time, depends on exactly what you are doing.

I have no experience with things bigger than 9" screens.

I have a full-size iPad that was part of a referral bonus from work, and currently I mostly use it for reading books on the T. It's slightly bigger and heavier for that purpose than I'd prefer (though lighter than the hardback edition of the book I'm currently reading on it). I do like that the screen is big enough to do a two-column pagespread. There are other annoyances to this use that have nothing to do with the screen size.

I've found that for things like Facebook and LJ, the screen is big enough that the browser works better than the apps.

::bookmarking this for future reference::

::thanks you::

I have been more than fine with my 7" iPad Mini, but I also have the regular iPad, which I use for reading academic papers as PDFs.

Tablet Opinions

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