Ask Slashdot: Tablets For Papers; Are We There Yet? 180
An anonymous reader writes "When I was younger, engineering and science offices didn't have computers yet. It was the tradition: Piled Higher and Deeper desks, and overloaded bookcases. I ended up doing other things, and haven't been in a regular office for a couple of decades. Now I'm older, spending a lot more time with the screen, and finding my aging butt and back aren't as pliable for the long hours of reading papers. And while looking at rather expensive chairs, etc for a solution, what I'm remembering is we used to be able to lean back, feet up, while reading the stapled print-outs — makes a change from hunched-over writing and typing. So I'm what wondering is this: Are We There Yet with tablets? You guys would know — What makes a good tablet for reading, sorting, annotating, and searching PDFs, etc? Hardware and software — what tablets have gotten this really right?"
iPad and iAnnotate (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't say what is right, but, having finished a masters in law via distance learning, with all my reading done on my iPad, I could recommend this as a solution. iAnnotate worked incredibly well for me, as a tool for reading and annotating PDF documents, which I then synchronised back to the server so they were available for access, including the notes, on my computers for actually writing things up. I'm now testing an iPad Mini, to see whether that offers a better experience — the lower quality screen is bugging me at the moment, but I do like the lighter weight.
I found the backlit screen irritating at first, but considered it a necessary evil for the benefit of having the annotation functionality, which my previous eReaders did not have. I bought a Kindle a couple of months ago for reading fiction, and found I really struggled with it — I'd rather read on the iPad (via iBooks, usually via DeDRM and Calibre). Perhaps oddly, I find I read much faster on the iPad than on the Kindle, without a noticeable impact on understanding — I wonder if this is due to me being able to scan large blocks of text quite quickly on the iPad but not on the Kindle for some reason. Suffice to say, having been really looking forward to a Kindle — going back to an eReader, having previously have a COOL-ER and a Sony PRS-505 — I was disappointed. My wife, on the other hand, hates reading from a tablet, and carries her Kindle pretty much everywhere.
No, not really... (Score:5, Interesting)
Things have gotten better; but I'd say that we aren't there yet.
E-ink has gotten good enough for light reading of anything that reflows adequately(and cheap enough that there is little risk in giving it a shot); but the refresh rate and available panel sizes and resolutions still make serious PDF crunching rather ugly.
The newer iPads have the resolution and speed to do PDFs justice; but capacitive touchscreens aren't exactly god's gift to stylus-based annotation. Yeah, they sell capacitive styluses; but it isn't exactly a Wacom...
"Traditional" tablet PCs had the Wacom pen input for annotation; but some mixture of technical limitations and PC OEM tastelessness always made them slower, clunkier, and more tethered to their AC adapter than was ever entirely comfortable.
If I had the cash, and really wanted to get away from the 'just-a-decent-laser-printer' solution, I'd strongly consider a portrait-oriented Cintiq display mounted on an ergotron-style floating arm. A Cintiq 22 or 24 is far too heavy to treat like a tablet; but the arm should give it effectively zero weight, and you'll get reasonably high resolution and excellent pen input.
Re:No, not really... (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend recently got a 10.1 inch Galaxy Note, and he raves about the stylus. It literally is a Wacom tablet that doubles as a screen. You might give that a try.
Re:Kindles are the way to go (Score:5, Interesting)
Much as I love my Kindle, it's not quite there for PDFs. While great for text (e.g. novels), it can't reflow a PDF well (or at all?), and the screen size makes it too small to reasonably view most PDFs at full size. A Kindle DX might be better, but still not ideal. Obviously color will be a no-go.
I would recommend an iPad or something similar for technical documents and most other PDFs. Goodreader + Dropbox is a great combination.
I agree for the PDFs and even eBooks that have diagrams or pictures, Kindle is not convenient. However a few months ago I lost my Kindle and decided to read stuff on my tablet, and what happened is that I basically stopped reading. Instead of sitting for a few hours and reading books I ended up picking up the tablet, firing up the eReader app but quickly switching to email, web browsing and games. I stayed less longer in coffee shops, doodling around on the tablets and getting restless quickly.
Then I bought a new Kindle and immediately I went back to reading a lot (usually two books a week). My tablet is now a living room fixture for when I watch a movie; when I go to a coffee shop I bring my Kindle and use my phone if I want to check my emails, which happens a lot less often when I read.
With my first Kindle I used to turn the wifi off to save battery but with the new one I find that I actually like the always-connected approach. I like to take notes and it's convenient that they follow my Amazon account, it makes it easier for me to go and buy a few books to dig a little more in a topic I found interesting. The Kindle is as convenient for buying books than the iPod Touch for buying music.
Tablets are great to read articles, emails and view diagrams. For books there is nothing like the Kindle (it's even better than actual books!).
Re:No, not really... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, technically, we were there, and the industry decided to start moving backwards.
I still use a Thinkpad X61 tablet which has a 1400x1050 screen (150 ppi) and a wacom digitizer. I've been using it to annotate PDF's for years. However, it's on it's last legs but there is still nothing to replace it with.
I made a paper cutout of the size of the screen for 10.1" and 11.6" and 13.3" Windows 8 devices at 1080p, which have respectively 218, 190, and 166 ppi. (In my opinion, 150 ppi is the absolute minimum to be able to read subscripts in a full-page maximized document). You'll notice that all these 16:9 screens are substantially narrower and taller than a sheet of paper. (16:9 is an aspect ratio of 1.78, while 8.5"x11" paper is 1.29) So maximizing the width of a full page on a portrait TV-screen gives you closer to 1.5 pages at a time. The old 4:3 monitors were perfect for documents in portrait mode (aspect ratio 1.33 -- so enough room for a toolbar). Why in the bloody dripping hell everyone decided to use TV screens for computer displays boggles my mind. On the most common Windows 8 screen size, 11.6" at 1080p, an 8.5"x11" document is compressed into a 5.69"x7.36" space. How good are your eyes? For those of you with your calculators out, that's less than half the area of the original 8.5"x11" paper. Sure you could zoom it, welcome to an unending hell of fiddling with scrollbars on a tablet device. Oh and don't forget those 1" document margins wasting screen space. Do you know a good PDF reader that can reliably zoom away margins for screen reading? Neither do I.
The only reasonable upcoming windows 8 device, in my opinion, is the Asus Taichi [engadget.com], the 13.3" version of which has been indefinitely delayed [theverge.com]. :-(
Everything else on the market either has: too small of a screen or no digitizer. So, in case anyone from the industry is reading this, bring back 4:3 screens, make them around 14" diagonal with very small bezels and while you're at it, give us > 200 PPI or higher and resistive digitizers!!!. An 8.5"x11" sheet of paper has a diagonal size of 13.9". There's a huge market out there that is unsatisfied. Everyone on the damn planet uses paper, and we need devices that emulate paper use-cases. The OP and myself would definitely buy such devices. Screw Apple and their narrow-minded "no stylus" initiative. Paper has been in use for thousands of years. It's not going to stop tomorrow.
Re:Just wait a little. (Score:2, Interesting)
Enough. I swear to the Great Sysadmin in the Sky, I'm fucking sick and tired of the snotty anti-Apple bias n Slashdot. You know what little kids? Back n the early days of Slashdot we really knew how to slam a company. Microsoft was the devil, I was building opm sources tools, and we were going to open the world. Yadda yadda.
Then I grew up and realized that proprietary platforms have their place. Some companies will work on boring stuff that open source devs don't want to touch. You know, like nice clean UIs. Or simple ways to install and manage software for non-techies. Stuff like that.
And if proprietary is all at bad, then why does the open source world spend so much time ripping it off? I just discovered an open source RSS reader for Linux that is the spitting image of Reeder for OS X and iOS. It's an exact copy. But that's ok because it's "open" right?
Fuck I hate the Linux community at times.
Re:Just wait a little. (Score:5, Interesting)