I’m a tech guy, but I really try and emulate the mindset of a non-technical person when I’m writing, since they are my audience. That’s why I find this quick review of a Polaroid Android tablet from Piers Anthony’s Newsletter so fascinating. Piers, a successful and prolific author, isn’t technical at all but his wife bought a $100 tablet. He’s using it now and likes it, but you can just read this thoughts yourself:
My Sony Reader expired just as I was about to read the foregoing novel. That gave my wife a pretext to shop for something she had had her eye on, and we got a Polaroid Android Tablet Computer on sale for a hundred dollars. As I like to put it, I’m an old codger from another century, and slow to catch on to newfangled dinguses, but I rather like this one. Its Adobe Reader handled the .pdf manuscript, oriented the page to be upright regardless of my orientation; sometimes as I let the device tilt the page would spin around to re-orient. I can show the pages as they are, in assorted type sizes, or have them reformat and wrap to remain always on the page. The print is beautiful, easy to read. But I am unable to jump to my place in the book, or to return directly to the beginning when I complete it. So I had to page backward through the 373 page manuscript, one page at a time. This gets old fast. It does hold my place if I keep it in ready mode, but loses it if I turn it all the way off to save power. It will play songs, and I can read with musical background; it seems to have a fair roster of popular songs to start with, and we added more. But it can be a federal case to make it stop playing, and we have not found out how to make it play our added songs. It acknowledges their presence, lists them, but won’t actually play them, instead playing only its own songs; it seems to think they are on the Internet. Would it be too much to ask that you be able to play a listed song by clicking on it? Or that there be an On/Off switch? If there is a Hell for programmers, it may have an On/Off switch for the tortures they undergo—that doesn’t work. It will handle WiFi, but as yet I have not caught up with that 21st century stuff. So it’s a novel experience, and I like it despite its frustrations.
I don’t know what I would use a tablet for if I didn’t have Wi-Fi.