Geared Up

[robinturner]

Like my ragged hippie friends from the '70s who lived on rural communes growing organic vegetables and listening to Steve Hillage on state-of-the-art-back-then music systems, I've always like to think of myself as the kind of idealistic person who is not at all interested in material goods … unless they're electronic. It was the same in the '80s, when my friends and I were saving our dole money to buy Sinclair Spectrums and Atari STs. Now it is impossible to keep up the pretense that you are a spiritual person who despises consumer goods but has an interest in electronic gadgets because electronic gadgets make up the majority of consumer durables. The only thing saving me from zombie consumerism is that on occasion I can say that I own enough tech, and now is one such time (the last time was probably in 1970, when I owned a gramophone, a transistor radio, and an etch-a-sketch). To be specific, I have an excellent music system (our first major purchase after we got married and still going strong), a TV, a DVD player, a smartphone and a computer well above the capacity I really need. Last week we upgraded our satellite TV subscription to give us recording capability and so dumped the VCR, which was by this time only playing in black and white and literally creaking, thus severing one of my remaining links to the '80s (the other being my car, but that's still got a few years in it).

Of course there are things I could want if I put my mind to it, like a Blu-ray player or 3D TV, but at the moment they seem like frivolities. I mean if I won a 3D TV in a lottery, I probably wouldn't say, "Nah, you keep it, those things make my eyes go funny," but I don't spend much time thinking about the empty hole in my life that a 3D TV would fill, more like the hole in my pocket one would make. The one thing I was thinking of buying was a Kindle, given how hard it is to read books on my phone, but that would mean lifting my personal boycott of Amazon (Wikileaks and bad working conditions). Fortunately my dilemma was solved by my brother, who arrived on a visit from England and—to my surprise and delight—presented me with a tablet. The rest of the family got the usual alcohol and perfumes, but my brother and I are geeks of a feather, so it was not only a tablet, it was an Android tablet I can have fun hacking, not one of those wimpy iPad things.

So did I really need a tablet? Hell, no. Do I like having one? Hell, yes. The important thing about a tablet is not that it is an e-book reader, web browser, video player and whatnot. The important thing is that is a tricorder. It is hard to explain to anyone who didn't grow up with the original Star Trek series to explain the hunger I always felt for the three Starfleet essentials: communicator, tricorder, phaser. We now have communicators in the form of mobile phones (in fact the first flip-top phone design was lifted from Star Trek). Now we have tricorders in the form of tablets. OK, my tablet won't perform medical tests or analyse the composition of rocks yet, but that's not the point. The point is that I get to walk around with a slab of electronics and look like I'm doing important stuff with it. Now all I need is a phaser … so maybe I don't have enough technology after all.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Please tell me more about your tablet, because I've got exactly the same problems with Amazon. I've seen a Kindle and liked it very much, but if there's a good alternative going I'm interested. About this time next year I will have paid off everything I owe on the home improvements, so I've decided I'm going to treat myself then.

[solri.livejournal.com]

It's an Advent Vega. Advantages:

• Cheaper than an iPad (around £250)
• Android system, so lots of good free apps
• Good processor
• HDMI port

Disadvantages:

• More expensive than a Kindle
• Heavier than a Kindle
• Hard to read in sunlight
• User manual sucks.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That's admirably clear.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

I don't know what a tricorder is.

I'm interested in something that I can hold in my lap and use to read e-Books as well as PDFs (I haaaaate reading PDFs at my computer). I don't want it to lock me into some system or brand with a bunch of proprietary crap. Ideally I can just upload a PDF straight from my hard drive to the device with a USB cord. In fact, it'd be nice if it read other document types as well. This is really something I should research myself as I have no idea what's out there (beyond the iPad and Kindle), but I'd might as well ask you: Does that describe what you have?

[solri.livejournal.com]

Yes, it does. There are a number of e-book readers available for Android tablets and phones - I use Aldiko, which reads e-pub and can import and convert PDF files. Then there a version of Acrobat, though I haven't tried it. With Documents to Go, you can read Word files etc. Of course it's not as easy on the eyes as a Kindle - backlit is backlit - but OTOH, you can read it at night easily. Aldiko even has a night mode with white text on a black background, which is easier on the eyes and on your partner who is trying to get to sleep!