Tablet 2.0

As promised, though it took long enough to finally happen, my replacement Sylvania tablet arrived last week. Though I gather the company has already discontinued the item (my guess: they wanted to cash in in time for Black Friday 2010, and then they beat a hasty retreat when stuff like the Motorola Xoom started peeking over the horizon), this is a slightly newer model, upgraded to Android 2.2. Ahead of the new machine’s arrival, I invested in a couple of modest extras for the anticipated replacement.

Let’s rewind a little bit. Many of you who have known me for the past ten years know that I’m seldom, if ever, seen traveling without my little electronic buddy…

…an NEC MobilePro, a model of pre-netbook wi-fi-capable handheld PC which went out of production circa 2003. To put it mildly, so much of what’s written on this web site was written on this little pal of mine in such diverse locations as the bathroom, the back deck, hotel rooms in Vegas, my in-laws’ place, and so on… it’s kinda funny. “Writing” is no longer an activity I associate with sitting in one place in front of a desktop PC. In fact, it’s become incredibly difficult for me to write in that scenario.

When I first got a Sylvania tablet last November, the thought in the back of my mind was that this would be replacing the MobilePro at some point.

Then I realized that even writing a medium-sized Facebook status update was an uphill climb with the on-screen Android touchscreen keyboard. Writing an entire article? To hell with that. When that first tablet went south in a big way, I effortlessly went back to using the MobilePro – and my writing output increased again, because it had a real live keyboard. (Getting that writing moved to a PC that could handle posting it to the site via WordPress was a whole different problem, since its wi-fi capability has been off the table for several months – it’s been thumb drive city.)

Before the replacement tablet arrived, I invested in one of those fancy flexible keyboards that you can roll up into a kind of squishy cylinder, stuff the USB connector down into the center of the cylinder, and throw it in your bag. This cost all of a couple of bucks on Amazon (here’s the item in question). It works like a charm, though sometimes response time and the response, period, is… unpredictable. You may have to hit the A key three times to get one A. You might hit it one time and six 6 As. It tries to pay off its balance in As, at least. Once you get past other oddities, such as the space bar being “segmented” into multiple keys (to accomodate the roll-up-ability) and an oddly placed second caps lock key that keeps biting me in the A, it’s really nifty.

I also wanted a stand for the thing so I could more or less mimic the MobilePro setup: the screen’s kicked back at an angle, the keyboard’s flat to the surface that the machine is sitting on. I needed something to hold the tablet itself at an angle so I didn’t have to hold the tablet with one hand and type with the other.

I started looking for tablet stands on Amazon, but quickly realized that this was an area where the world has gone utterly mad. It’s a stand. It’s just a stand. I need it to hold a little portable computer, sure, but… it’s a bloody stand!

The problem is, especially with the advent of the iPad, once you establish that a product is for use with a tablet computer, just go ahead and jack the price up by $40 and the world will cough it up, because, ooooh, iPad! iPuke at the thought of paying an insane amount of money for a stand.

So I went to the local Michael’s (arts & crafts chain store) and got a little rubber-coated hinged stand, intended for picture frames that don’t have a built-in stand. Total cost: not quite $4.

And it works.

I’ve already started writing stuff on the go in earnest with this deploy-it-just-about-anywhere setup. Hell, I’ve even gotten back to working on those oft-promised, oft-delayed book projects. All I needed was the replacement tablet and $6 worth of extras, and guess what? iWin.

Rejected product shot: kitten backside shown for size comparison.