I haven’t bought a dead tree version of a book for years. If it’s not available as either an ebook or an audiobook then I don’t buy it. The same goes for music, and when the film industry realises that DRM is a fallacy, I’ll be able to do the same with video too.
Ideally I want to have my entire collection of books with me wherever I go, but not just books. I want to take my music and video collection too. The iPhone kickstarted a revolution in convergence devices that go a long way towards making this possible. Whilst I can’t carry my entire music and video collection on my phone because they are too large, I can carry my favourites and still have enough space for all my ebooks.
Recently I’ve encountered a couple of situations where my phone doesn’t suffice though. I write a lot of notes on paper (or 3×5 index cards) and they are prone to getting lost or recycled accidentally. For this the phone keyboard is too small, and I’m not sure whether I would be more comfortable with a pen or stylus over a keyboard anyway. I also started playing the guitar again and printing guitar tab is a waste of paper and often difficult to read. Again the phone is too small to display this type of content effectively.
I thought about getting an eReader like the Kindle or Nook to address this issue, but I’m not convinced they will provide everything I need. I think they would be fantastic for replacing paper content, but I’m not so sure about the note taking, even though the Kindle has a physical keyboard and the Nook has a virtual keyboard that would fill an iPhone screen.
The elephant in the room is the iPad. It can do everything my phone can do but has a bigger screen. The battery life isn’t as good as an eReader and the screen will get full of fingerprints, but it will do everything I want. When it came out, I said I couldn’t see a need for one in my life because it didn’t solve any problems for me. Then I chuckled to myself as I saw lots of people buy them, play with them for two weeks and then struggle to figure out what they were going to use it for! Now I do have a use for a 10” iPhone I feel like a bit of a dummy. I hate it when Apple are right!
Even so, given my feelings towards Apple right now though, I am loathed to give them more of my hard earned cash. The only semi-viable alternative I have found is the Archos 10 internet tablet. There are plenty of cheap Chinese rip offs of the iPad, but I’ve used Archos devices before and they were very good quality. Physically and technically it has very similar specifications to the iPad but it runs the Android 2.2 Froyo operating system. Given that Android phones have similar capabilities to an iPhone, I figure an Android tablet must have similar capabilities to an iPad!
Only time (and finances) will tell whether I end up with an eReader, an iPad or another tablet device, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them turned to be my next gadget purchase, so I can remove more dead trees from my life!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Copyright ©Craig Aspinall 2011