When I began this blog I had hoped to move directly off of my PCs and MACs onto a Smartphone. What I have discovered is that this goal is not yet functionally feasible. Smartphones are getting better but they are a long way off from automatically connecting to my TV via Bluetooth so that I can surf the web and read/write my emails on a bigger screen.

In fact even the logical half step isn’t ready for prime time yet. I have been using an iPad for over a year now and though it is usually pretty good in entering the web quickly, it does not work for email and functional web surfing. The reason is because of a religious war Apple is having and therefore they are not supporting Flash which pretty much is ubiquitous on the web. Without Flash I am forced to get up from the TV room and find a PC to use a fully functional browser.

The iPad has other shortcomings as well. I have tried Apps to force the Safari web browser to remember my login settings but none of the Apps does this easily. Typing on the iPad is also cumbersome. I bought the iPad because it was on fast and ready for work but now actually typing makes it slower than a PC to use. The iPad interprets my misspellings and inserts words I didn’t intend to use – and I mean with every misspelling. Therefore I spend a bunch of time proofing so that I don’t send out emails saying the exact opposite of what intended or worse. Further typing on glass is difficult – you never know if you struck the tile properly which leads you back to the auto correction problem.  And I won’t get into the fact that you only delete characters backward and how hard it is get the cursor to where the misspelling is. Editorial hell.

I have read countless reviews for the spate of new Android tablets which are coming out on the market but the reviews are essentially meaningless.Here is a perfect example for the Samsung Galaxy Tab. They talk about glitz and glam – how the screen looks and how well a movie plays on the tablets which is not why I want to own a tablet. I want computing which is purely utilitarian. No operating system to patch and maintain or the other laborious chores. I have already invested 30 years of my life doing this. No mas  - No more.

The tablets will of course improve. However until such time as tablets can easily clear the bar in the following areas I am going to patch my move off of thick clients in another way. Before I describe that allow me to list the functional areas which tablets must be able to function seamlessly:

1)      Browsing the web. The browser can’t freeze, crash or take more than 2 seconds to go where I told it to go. The browser should be great working versions of the browsers we use today. Number one is Firefox – somebody please lift up the phone and call Mozilla - get cracking. Others like Chrome, Opera etc must meet the functional specs as well. Another huge element here is having the browser capable of remembering my website logons. Did I mention I want fast and not a ton of difficult and slow typing? Finally I have read forums of the top rated Android Tablets and they all say that the browsers are still clinkers. Here is a link to the Asus EEE Transformer tablet forum which demostrates this issue clearly. 

2)      Flash is the web standard for anything moving. Tablets that can’t handle Flash are none starters. Don’t give me 1,000,000 arcane instructions to get the OS and the tablet to try and work around this issue. If you don’t support Flash – the browser won’t display why I went there – then it will do all the things under item 1 like – crash, freeze or just go somewhere I had no intention of going.

3)      A tablet with some docking accessory also is a zero. I can’t hold the tablet and type on a Bluetooth keyboard without some docking mechanism. When the TV can handle the screen – I won’t be using a tablet anymore – I will be using a Smartphone. So don’t try and dance around or patch this issue. Just build the dock accessory and offer to us folks who actually intend to use the tablet to do something other than watch movies or aimlessly wander the Internet without concern as to what I am seeing.

4)      Not a pre requisite – hence in the bottom slot here but it should have some way to store data, photos, mp3s and my other junk on my local network. The hard drives are not the limitation. All of my data is shared inside of my network so that any other machines/users/my family can get to it. When they built these wireless tablets  - what on earth were they thinking we were going to do with our emails, files etc? Just throw everything away? I am betting Apple and Microsoft are hoping we will buy and keep both the tablets and the PCs. No thank you.

So here’s the thing. I am going to take the functional approach and get a Netbook. Which one I don’t know. Yes I know they are neither fish nor foul. They aren’t a full blown PC and they are not tablets/Smartphones  - BUT – they do items 1-4 fairly well, and yes I have heard they can be slow at times. However I don’t expect to have to run around the house when somebody sends me a flash video, email or weblink to locate a PC.

Stay tuned. When I said compromise – I meant for something which works. I will let the utility devices mature while I get my computing done quickly and easily so that I have a real life that isn’t glued to one screen or another for the majority of the day.

Leo