When I saw the first iPad, all I could do was wonder what the point was. Was it to read books? A Kindle or Sony Ebook Reader seems like a better option, something with an e-ink display. Was it to stay in touch, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, instant message, and the like? My phone does all of that, and is more convenient to carry around. Was it to browse the web? My laptop does that, and it has a handy-dandy keyboard attached in case I want to actually type something. It seemed like, for everything the iPad did, a different device did it better.
That said, I come from the Linux school of thought, which is that any given tool should have a limited set of functions, and the tool should perform those functions well. If you need different functionality, reach for a different tool. This is not the mindset of the Apple or Microsoft world, which in general seems to favor monolithic software design. I eventually came to understand that the iPad’s purpose is to be a shitty ebook reader, a shitty phone, and a shitty laptop, all in one device. The convenience of having this all in a single device, presumably, outweighs the shittiness. It’s not good at any one job, but it does alright.
But then I started seeing Android-based tablets. Suddenly the notion of a tablet started seeming kind of cool. When I saw the Honeycomb demos, I was drooling. I didn’t understand why, but I wanted one. I had no idea what I’d do with it, but I’d find a purpose, because it was COOL dammit. When the Xoom was released with a $599 price point, I pretty much gave up on the idea. I could buy a decent laptop for that much. I could rebuild my PC for that. Again, I decided a tablet was not for me, though I kind of wanted one.
Eventually I noticed that there was a lot of conversation about the Nook Color, and how easy it was to root it and install a custom Android ROM such as Cyanogen. Just the idea of rooting a Nook, installing Cyanogen, and downloading the Amazon Kindle app from the market made me giggle. At $250, the Nook was looking like a serious contender for my introduction to the world of tablets. A co-worker was having similar thoughts, and he purchased one. I helped him root it and install Cyanogen, which earned me the privilege of messing around with it a bit and evaluating it. After a few hours, I realized I was not impressed. For one thing, the screen was too small to read anything. For another, since the Nook only had a single hardware key, the standard Android “Search, Home, Menu, and Back” buttons had to be emulated in software. It was clunky and lame. Finally, the dealbreaker: no good bluetooth support, which was a dealbreaker for reasons I’ll detail later.
The next day, woot had a sale on ViewSonic gTablets. Retail price $399, on sale for $280. I bought one immediately, figuring that if I didn’t like it I could sell it online and get my money back, maybe even turn a small profit.
The tablet arrived yesterday. I have now had it for 24 hours, and I wanted to offer a detailed review, specifically geared toward those who, like me, are skeptical of tablets in general.
Purpose
With the gTablet in my hand, I had to ask myself what it’s purpose was going to be. What would I use it for? I had to figure out the tablet’s job if I was going to evaluate whether it was good at it. Here was what I decided:
- Video – One of my favorite things about my Droid 1 (I still love that thing) is that I can bring it to the gym and watch movies on it. The processor is powerful enough that, with Rock Player I can play a full XviD movie without converting it in any way. I sit the phone on the little magazine shelf on most aerobic machines and watch movies. To avoid running a headphone cord to the phone (which could result in knocking it off and damaging it), I enable my phone’s Bluetooth and hook my headphones to a small Bluetooth receiver which I clip to my shorts. I absolutely love being able to do this, so the most important purpose of my tablet was going to be to do the same thing but with a larger screen.
- Reading – I’ve tried e-ink readers in the past, but in the end I really like having paper books. That said, being able to store an entire library of books on a single device would be very convenient, especially with regard to textbooks. I needed to be able to read Kindle books, PDFs, CHM files (lots of downloadable books come in this format), and DejaVu format books (weirdly, lots of textbooks are in this format). The device needs to be convenient and comfortable for reading.
- Browsing – You can pry my reddit from my cold dead fingers. I spend more time browsing reddit and my Google Reader account than is even remotely healthy. When the tablet isn’t playing movies and displaying books, it will be used for my other favorite pastime: procrastinating. It needs to provide decent access to the web and my Google Reader account in a way that allows me to use it at work, in bed, and, I’ll go ahead and admit it, in the bathroom. I AM NOT ASHAMED.
So how does the device stack up? Let’s dive in.
Hardware
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When I first got the hardware, I was surprised at how heavy it was. 1.55 pounds doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you’re holding the device upright for an extended period of time for reading, it can get kind of annoying. That said, it’s lighter than a laptop, and even lighter than most books I read, so I’m not sure why I found it bothersome.
The screen is terrible. I had read reviews of the gTablet and saw constant reports that the viewing angle on the LCD screen is bad, but I ignored them. “I’m only going to be looking at it straight on,” I thought to myself, “and frankly it’d be great if being off to the side made the screen unreadable, I hate over-the-shoulder readers.” I was wrong, the viewing angle is far worse than that. If I held the device relatively close to my face (close enough to read small text), the respective images that each of my eyes got differed in color enough that it actually created a weird, 3D-ish effect for text or high-contrast images. It’s hard to explain, but it made text difficult to read close up. Tilting the screen just a few degrees made the screen unusable.
Another issue with the viewing angle is that it differs depending on orientation. When held in landscape mode, one can easily tilt side to side and still see the screen pretty well. However, if you tilt vertically, the screen becomes a dark mess. This means that, when holding the tablet in portrait mode, one cannot move side to side at all. The strange “3D pixels” effect was not noticeable when holding the tablet in landscape mode, but it was distracting as hell in portrait mode. This device is meant to be held in landscape mode, anything else makes it irritating.
Other than those two issues, the hardware is pretty good. The processor is powerful, far more powerful than my phone, able to play games and movies at a better framerate than I am used to on my overclocked Droid 1. Angry Birds looked great for the ten minutes I could stand playing it before I realized I was playing Angry Birds and became filled with self-loathing. Loading applications is quick, and the screen and tablet are responsive. I never felt like the device was lagging or slow, no matter what I was doing with it. The 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 Dual-core is a badass (though rumor has it that the software only takes advantage of 1 core). I definitely had the sense of “the future is here, I’m holding a fucking tablet computer” while using it.
Battery life was generally good. A full charge lasted the full 24 hours without needing much in the way of recharging. The device does a decent job of entering a power-saving state when not in use.
Software
ViewSonic’s software is absolute garbage. The stock ROM of the device is a steaming pile. I lasted about 20 minutes with the device before I’d had enough and started investigating how to root the device and replace the ROM.
It’s not just the interface, either. In fact, the default configuration was “Classic Home” which is a normal home screen with icons, widgets, and an app drawer, just like any standard Android device. The first problem was that, despite the fact that I had correctly configured my Wi-Fi, none of the installed applications could use the internet. The Amazon Kindle app and the Twitter app both informed me that no Wi-Fi connection was available, and they failed to connect. The included web browser could connect just fine, so this was strange.
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After dealing with that frustration, I decided to install Opera, since the included web browser sucked. I scoured my app drawer, but there was a noticeable lack of “Market”. No Android Market? How is that even possible, isn’t this a “with Google” device? I checked the box and the frame of the tablet only to discover, no, it is not. “Google” isn’t mentioned anywhere. In fact, there was no Gmail, no Calendar, and no Talk. The only thing resembling a “Market” was a shortcut to Handango.com, which appeared to be the sole supplier of apps for the gTablet. None of my favorite apps were available here.
Once I rooted and installed TnT Lite, the device became much more usable. I configured Gmail, and the Market, and I downloaded all of my favorite Android applications. Rooting was a cinch, detailed here. The next few hours with the device were much more enjoyable, as I installed and played with tons of apps, including Opera.
One other point worth mentioning is the keyboard. I found the keyboard highly frustrating. It was responsive enough to handle my typing speed (mostly), but what I found frustrating about it was how difficult it was for me to type in any convenient way. Typically the way the tablet is held is with both hands, one on each side of the tablet held horizontally. This means that the only fingers one can use for typing are the thumbs. Typing with all fingers requires placing the tablet on some kind of surface. Unfortunately, the four innermost columns of keys are difficult to reach with thumbs, the two in the center nearly impossible without some contortion. There is a keyboard replacement for Tablets called Thumb Keyboard that attempts to rectify this, but I couldn’t get it to work on the device. It might be Honeycomb-only.
Video
I brought the device to the gym with a movie on it, per my usual routine. I found that lugging the larger device around was a bit cumbersome, but the real problem was the viewing angle once again. On the stair climber, the “magazine shelf” was positioned in such a way as to deny me a straight-on view of the screen. Being just a few degrees off center made my movie virtually unwatchable (and considering that the movie was The Mutant Chronicles, the fact that it could be made more unwatchable was impressive). I switched to the elliptical machine, which had the shelf a bit lower and gave me a straight-on view of the screen, which was much better.
The larger screen, which I thought would be great for the gym, was actually a problem. Because it was so large, it blocked the displays of the machines, so I had to move the device to the side every so often to check in on my calories burned, or to see what phase of my program I was in. This was an unexpected annoyance. I honestly didn’t feel like the larger screen made the movie all that much more watchable, but it definitely made it harder to work out.
Something else I hadn’t anticipated was the simple fact that carrying a tablet around in the gym made me feel like a douchebag. All of these other people are listening to music or reading magazines, and here I waltz in with a damned tablet computer. It made me feel like a complete asshole.
Otherwise, the experience was decent. The Bluetooth worked fine, allowing me to listen to the movie without a problem. It’s worth saying that the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth do not seem to work simultaneously: turning on Bluetooth disabled Wi-Fi for me. This wasn’t a big deal, since my gym doesn’t have Wi-Fi (why should it?), but it’s worth pointing out. The screen was nice and big for video playback, and in a way the terrible viewing angle worked in my advantage. It means that, next time I’m watching a movie and a sex scene comes on, I won’t have to worry about the woman on the treadmill next to me thinking I’m watching porn at the gym!
Reading
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I installed a number of reading-centric apps including Amazon Kindle, Nook, Adobe Reader, a CHM viewer, a DejaVu reader, and epub reader, and Google Books. I tried them all out, trying to give each a fair shake.
Reading PDFs was an instant failure. There was no way to get a textbook’s large page size to fit entirely within the screen without the text being too small. To make the text readable, I had to zoom in, which made scrolling through pages quite difficult (no “next” button or anything like that). The CHM viewer wasn’t much better, though it did allow me to resize text in a way that realigned the text to the screen. However, every time I moved to the next page, this view was reset, forcing me to zoom in again, each and every page.
Amazon Kindle and Nook fared best, offering a wide array of view options, text size configuration, and the like. Reading in the Amazon Kindle app was most pleasant, and felt most like a real book. The other ebook readers only let the pages be viewed in portrait mode. As I mentioned earlier, the viewing angle on portrait mode was so bad that my two eyes received different images of varying brightness levels, creating an unpleasant effect on high-contrast images, including text.
Ultimately, staring at a light bulb just isn’t as good as a real paper book. And it’s not about the brightness level, I tried turning it down, and I tried switching the color scheme to white on black instead of black on white. It just isn’t as good as paper. I didn’t really like e-ink either (I used to have a Sony Ebook Reader). It’s just too damn hard to fit all of the text and images on a single page of a technical book onto one of these smaller screens without losing something. You lose contextual clues in your peripheral vision, you lose the ability to quickly flip back a couple pages to remind yourself of something, and, most importantly, you lose the pieces of information you absorb subconsciously when you are reading a paper book, such as how far you are through the book or where a certain piece of information is approximately. It is also difficult to flip forward a few pages to see how much is left in the current chapter. Doing this takes a few seconds in a paper book, but much longer in a ebook, where pages have to load and render. It’s a small gripe, but it’s annoying.
I think when it comes to books, I’m just going to have to admit that I’m a luddite. I like the feel and look of actual paper. I find myself reading paper books, and skimming ebooks. I’m not sure why this is, maybe it has something to do with the lack of whitespace margins or something. I also can’t justify paying for the Kindle edition of a book of which I own a physical copy. If I could add the ebook for a few bucks, that’d be one thing, but usually the ebook is half the cost of the paper book. Since I want the paper book too, I can’t justify the expense at all. It’s not like you can even buy used Kindle books or sell your copies of books you don’t want anymore.
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One cool thing though: reading comic books was awesome. The visual nature of comic books made the “3D” effect far less apparent. If I was really into comic books, this would be a pretty great way to read them.
Browsing
The stock web browser was crap, but Opera ran great. Internet access was fast and highly enjoyable. But no matter what sites I visited or used, I always felt like I’d rather be using a laptop. For me, the web is participatory. When I am using the internet on a computer, I feel like I’m a MEMBER of the internet. I’m posting comments on blogs, responding to messages, writing e-mails, posting to Twitter, updating Facebook, and so on. When I’m using the internet on a phone or a tablet, I’m an OBSERVER of the internet. I’m consuming the internet passively. This is fine when I’m bored in a meeting, but you can’t slyly hide a tablet in your lap during a meeting. The tablet works better in bed or at a desk, and in those situations I constantly feel like I’d rather have a keyboard under my fingertips.
When I’m browsing a programming site, I may see a cool idea that makes me want to write some code. On a laptop, making this shift is easy, but not so on a tablet. I transition so easily between consuming and producing that restricting myself to a consumption-only device felt unnatural. Typing was so difficult on a tablet that it discouraged me from doing it at all.
Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were all usable from the tablet, but only for reading and watching. I never posted anything to any of those sites while using the tablet. I post to Twitter and Facebook more often on my phone, as typing on that is even easier than on the tablet, despite the smaller screen. It’s not that the tablet is BAD for browsing the web, it’s just that there are things that are better.
Final Verdict
It’s just not for me. I tried really hard to like my tablet, and I really wanted to justify keeping it, but in the end it’s just not good enough at any of the things it can do. I find the IDEA of a tablet appealing, but not the execution. Would it be nice to carry 50 books around in my backpack in under 2 pounds? Yeah, but that doesn’t do me much good if it’s too obnoxious to actually read them. Is it cool to browse the internet whenever I want? Yes, but I can do the same thing on my phone. And to be brutally honest, I can walk to the bathroom with my phone in my pocket and nobody will notice, but everyone knows what’s going on if I’m caught heading toward the toilet with my tablet under my arm. DON’T JUDGE ME.
I honestly don’t understand how Apple managed to convince everyone that tablets are something that people need. A netbook does everything a tablet does, costs a lot less, and has an actual keyboard attached. Do people really need a $500 way of hurling birds at green pigs? It just seems like Apple devotees are convinced they need tablets because Steve Jobs says so, and the rest of us need them because all of those Apple people have them, and why should they get all the cool gadgets?
I spent 24 hours with a tablet and was simply unable to find a single thing I could actually use it for on a regular basis. In the end, I made a listing to sell it online. I hope the buyer is able to find more uses for it than I was. As it stands, I’ll keep my computer on my desk, my phone in my pocket, and my book in my lap.