Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Using a Tablet As a Sole Computing Device?
cashman73 writes "My mother's six year old desktop computer finally bit the dust due to an electrical surge. It's out-of-warranty, and not really worth fixing. Plus, I'm 2,500 miles and two time zones away, so I can't exactly troubleshoot things from here. I recently got a new tablet, and even 80% of the things I do are done easier with it. Plus, she really likes the size, convenience, portability, and the screen. Virtually everything she does is simple web browsing, email, light photo sharing but no heavy editing, and other simple tasks. We're thinking that using a tablet as her sole 'computer' might be the best solution here. What are other Slashdotter's experiences using tablets without a separate desktop computer?"
Buy her a Chromebook. You won't be sorry.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
For the cheaper price and the desktop functionality, if all you need it for is web browsing and email, I'd go with a Chromebook. If you want to go 100% tablet, you are almost certainly going to have to buy a keyboard, so it would be very hard to get a decent combo for less than the $249 Samsung or the $199 Acer Chromebooks.
We still print quite regularly. Things like e-vouchers and booking references. Sure there are ways around that, but a printed piece of paper can't crash on you or run out of battery.
The Asus Transformer line of tablets are great "mini-notebooks".
One of the big advantages is that you can buy the tablet, and if you don't need the keyboard, you don't pay for it. If you do, you can get the Asus dock version, or any bluetooth keyboard. With the dock, though, you get a full-size SD card slot and full-sized USB connectors, so you can easily move data (like photos mentioned in the summary) to/from other devices. The only real negative I have seen on the latest versions (which fix the poor GPS reception of earlier versions) is that they don't support 5GHz for 802.1n.