Ask Slashdot: Tablets For Papers; Are We There Yet?

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?"

Re:we are NOT there yet.

[fustakrakich]

LCD screen tablets == eyestrain after a long reading period.

Turn the brightness down. It makes a big difference. When I discovered that, all those problems went away.

Re:Just wait a little.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you deserve to die of cancer like your fuck buddy Jobs.

If you knew the slightest thing about open source and free software you'll realize that why it is important is because it gives you chooses. Something Apple doesn't.

So, please, get cancer, and then die in an horrific fire. That'll give you a taste of what's to come when you go to hell you Evil Apologist.

Re:Just wait a little.

[supercrisp]

OTOH, I just plug up an iPod Touch, and it syncs perfectly. Upon moving to Android for a phone, it took me a while to find an app that wasn't full of myspace-esque glimmering gimmicks like some 80s boombox; after that it was manually managing files in a folder, which is simple but tedious. That was until I found doubleTwist, which made the Android simple and one-click like the iPhone/iPod Touch. Either iTunes must be really horrible on Windows, or it's because people just have to have their media files all over the drive. And, I know that last one gets a lot of hate: evil Apple oppresses me because it wants my files in one place!!! Well, a) there's an option to not do that, and b) why aren't you also complaining about apps like calibre that do the same thing? And, yes, iTunes wants one library. The model for MacOS is based on individual users that log in, like most modern OSs. So, well, they expect you to do that with iTunes too. And, frankly, it's trivial to get around that with a beginner-level hack (if I can do it, anyone can), or you can buy some $10 piece of shareware to do it for you. No bigs. Sure, Apple stuff is locked down. But not as badly as some say.