Do You Still Use Your Tablet?

Recently my friend Craig posted over on his blog how he’d stopped using his Android tablet after a while and was wondering whether other people have experienced something similar. So I thought I’d reply with how I use my iPad these days and just why it’s still in my arsenal of tech gadgets.

Almost every job I’ve had has seen me sitting in front of a desktop for a sizeable amount of time every day and even my teaching job has me slaving away over a keyboard to create worksheets and lesson plans every day. The end result of all this is that when I finish off the day at work and head back home the last thing I’m keen to do is to sit in front of yet another PC screen to read up on the days news or even type out these blog posts.

When I need to do any of those things I whip out my trusty iPad Air and browse the web, catch up on my RSS feeds with Unread or type out a blog post in Drafts & Ulysses. And while doing this I can just sit back on the couch and not have to be shackled to a table or desk with a laptop or desktop computer.

It also comes in useful when I need to study Japanese with apps that let me do my WaniKani kanji reviews and study flashcards for the Genki chapter I’m working on or practice my vocabulary for the JLPT.

What keeps me coming back to my iPad is that these are just a few of the things I can do with it. There are millions of apps that let me not just consume content, but also create it. Paper from Fifty-Three and Pixelmator are two apps that I love using when I get a creative itch and I can even record music and vocals using Garageband. iMovie is especially awesome for me as I do a lot of video projects with my students and it’s really convenient to not have to always lug my laptop around to edit videos.

With Microsoft throwing their mobile Office apps onto the App Store for free and Apple’s iWork apps also being free I can also use my iPad to knock out worksheets or update my expense spreadsheets from under my warm kotatsu with the minimum of effort!

So all in all you could say that I still very much find my tablet useful but I do see that for many people that may not be the case. Maybe larger phones have played a role in moving people away from buying tablets, or maybe it’s just that fewer people upgrade their tablets as frequently as their phones. I do think though that tablets can play a useful role for some of us. I know that I for one am still using my on a daily basis!