Ask Slashdot: Easy Wi-Fi-Enabled Tablet For My Dad?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm looking to pick up a tablet for my father. He is in his 70s and the internet is a bit of a mystery to him, but he asked me about a way to send/receive email and watch online videos. He is not interested in getting a smartphone or changing his cheap phone plan that doesn't include data. But he is interested in getting a tablet and using the free Wi-Fi that is available in his building. Here is my question: can you recommend a tablet equivalent to those phones with the big numbers that they sell to older people? Does there exist a tablet with an interface that would be simple and easy to use for someone who has very little experience with computer GUIs?"

Comments

Get an iPad

[KliX]

Got one for my mum - problem solved.

Didn't even have to explain how to use it!

Re:Get an iPad

[emblemparade]

I guess YMMV. I suggest the iPad, strongly.

I got my parents each an iPad as a gift, and it was life transforming, especially for my mom. She never got a hang of computers, even though she even tried to take some computer classes. The mouse, the overlapping windowing interface, dialogs that pop up... a constant source of frustration. Desktop OSes require so much knowledge to just do basic things: we who were raised with them take it for granted. But the iPad somehow made sense to her. She never stops thanking me for it! She emails every day, looks up things in Google, and has recently started to use Facebook (although she is very confused by the interface... heck, I'm a programmer and I can barely understand FB's interface...). We also use Skype a lot, and it works great! Though she often forgets that she needs to "see my name in green" to know that I'm actually have Skype open. She thinks of the whole device as "also a telephone" and still doesn't quite understand that an "app" has to be open.

Related: my mom had a Galaxy phone at the time, and of course couldn't make heads or tails of it. But, once she "understood" the iPad, she also understood that the iPhone is just a "small iPad", and got one for herself. I'm so proud of her. :) It's also really interesting for me to see how she is exploring this new world in pretty much the opposite direction of what I expected: tablet first, smartphone later. Also interesting, I thought she might find the iPad Mini better, because she carries her iPad around all the time. But she told me she saw one that a friend of hers had, and thought it was ridiculously small and pointless!

For the record, I'm the ... opposite of an Apple fanboi. I have a Nexus 10 tablet myself, rooted with CynaogenMod. I use Ubuntu exclusively for my desktop and traveling netbook. For my needs, those are definitely the better choices. But for my mom, I must concede that iOS is simply easier to use. Fewer menus, fewer options, and that's all good for someone who is confused by even one option. I've learned that my mom not only has different needs, but also views these technologies from an entirely different, and I would say fresher perspective than mine.

Trust me: get you dad an old iPad, it may change his life. You definitely don't need an iPad 2 in terms of power, although consider the iPad Air. I'm thinking of upgrading my mom to it, I think she might appreciate the lighter weight.

Also: I don't know how old your dad is and how his vision is, but also look into increasing the font sizes, and show him how to use the click-zoom feature. It's built into the iPad, and can definitely help older folks.

Old dogs & new tricks

[Anonymous Coward]

If he "has very little experience with computer GUIs", why force one upon him?

Why not instead give him something that he can control in a manner that's at least vaguely reminiscent of the way he would have used computers when he was working?

My suggestion -- a cheap, used laptop (say, 3 to 5 years old max.) with a decent wifi card in it, running your GNU/Linux distro of choice, with mutt for mail and mplayer with svgalib for the videos.

With a few carefully chosen aliases added to his .profile, it shouldn't be hard at all to make bash feel "just like" CP/M, DCL, JCL, DOS or whatever he used to use at work, so the only "new" things to adjust to would be mutt & mplayer. Once he's comfortable with that, you can introduce to what's under the hood and gradually remove the "training wheels"...

This ^

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

My mother struggled like mad with an ipad after I lent her mine, that she decided that after all she didn't want one and stuck with her laptop. It also kyboshed her desire for an 'iphone' when after I explained that while all her friends may have one, an iphone is just a very small ipad - smaller screen, smaller icons.

Dexterity is a problem, holding the tablet withoyt realising that your contact with the hand you are holding it with is preventing the finger on the other hand from being able to move the icons. She just ended up putting on a table flat to use in case she accidentally touched the screen in the wrong place.

It was quite suprising as I hadn't considered that using an ipad would be that hard.

Turns out my father also struggled with the touch-screen environment on my sister's iphone.

"online videos"

[cerberusss]

He is in his 70s and the internet is a bit of a mystery to him, but he asked me about a way to send/receive email and watch online videos

Ah yes, he wants to watch "online videos". Really, the old goat will be browsing 4chan and redtube when he hears you closing the front door behind your ass.

94 year-old Grandmother

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny enough I just gave my grandmother an iPad 3 weeks ago. After about 3 1ahour sessions she has become amazingly proficient with it. To add to her difficulty in understanding the UI concepts she also has a severe case of macular degeneration which prevents her from seeing small text and what not AND only speaks French. To my amazement the next day after returning home from visiting her (I live across the country from her) I receding several iMessages and a FaceTime call - I didn't even teach her how to use the former (iMessage).

That being said, I love both Android and iOS devices but I felt that simplicity of use fell in the realm of the iPad - and from her amazing usage of it I am even more convinced of this.

My recommendation: get him/her an iPad.

Re:iPad

[Cosmic Debris]

Seconded. My 85-year-old father has had an iPad literally from day 1. My brother was living with my parents when the iPad came out and he went to the nearby Apple store and got them both 1st gen iPads. My brother has since passed away and I updated his iPad to a 3rd gen model and got a matching model so I could help him out over the phone...something that has turned out to be almost unnecessary.

Yeah, it was a metric ton of money but thus far worth every penny. My mother is home-bound and my Dad is her primary caregiver. He greatly enjoys the iPad and has had no trouble using it. He has virtually abandoned his old Mac G5 tower. The iPad is a great social connection to his remaining college chums and keeps him in touch with the grandchildren on Facebook. He loves to play various word games like "Words with Friends."

To be fair, this could all be done with a modern Android-based tablet and I don't think my Dad would have any trouble with it but honestly I'm not going to change horses mid-stream. But the huge app base for iOS helps greatly plus a good deal of my brothers and sisters plus their children have iPads so things are just easier. I never thought I'd advocate for monoculture like this (or even appear to) but this has brought a great deal of joy into my Father's life as my Mother's health has gone downhill over the past few years. This alone has made the iPads worth every penny.

My advice: look at an iPad first but whatever you do don't cheap out.

Re:iPad

[tverbeek]

One advantage of getting him an iPad that can run iOS7 is the fact that it has a setting to scale the default font size up and down. It only works for apps that support it, but the built-in Mail app is one of them, so you can scale the text size up for him.

Re:iPad

[tverbeek]

Did you read the question? How are the cameras and higher resolution worth anything to a man in his 70s who just wants to read e-mail and watch movies? The high pixel density on the latest displays is wasted on someone with declining eyesight and presbyopia (and encourages app developers who don't understand this to use tiny fonts, just because they can). And I can't recall the last time I used a camera while reading e-mail or watching a movie. He was asking about a tablet for his father, not for you.

Re:iPad

[xenoc_1]

My Samsung galaxy tab 2.

I installed cyanogenmod and its going to get "kitkat" shortly.

Which expensive tablet only allows you to run what the vendor says you can?

Same thing I said to the iPad guy. Being able to install new ROMs matters exactly why, to this use case?

No, OP's dad isn't going to give a crap about cyanogen mod. Nor about any of the other "latest and greatest" that Android fanboyz and iFans each seem to thing is so important as you rush down to give the retailers more money every few months, and then root/jailbreak/mod the shiny you just bought.

Everyone is not you.