Tablets, take two

Yikes! It seems I grabbed a tiger by the tongue when I looked at tablet computers in last week’s column. I don’t usually like to hammer the same topic twice in a row, but based on this week’s e-mail it seems to be a hot topic. Well, why not? Things have been quiet for two years on the Saipan tech front. There’s been so little to get excited about. So let’s relish the action now, though I’ll probably have to rehash a little information just to keep things cohesive.

Of course, for openers, mobile computing has always been a strong suit of the Saipan lifestyle, be it web surfing over breakfast in a local restaurant, or taking a computer to Asia and beyond for business travel.

For a lot of people, though, a computer is overkill. They just want to see the Web and do similar tasks. Meanwhile, nobody I know wants to over-invest in tech, things are too tight for that.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised that Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire tablet, is apparently finding its way onto a lot of holiday shopping lists. (In last week’s column I simply called it the “Fire,” but the full name is “Kindle Fire.”) One attraction of the gig is that it allows users to instantly buy and download electronic books (and other stuff) from Amazon, an attribute it shares with its sibling devices from Amazon.

We’ve got a fuzzy overlap to heed, incidentally, including some rehash from last week which I’ll confine to one paragraph. On one hand, there are dedicated e-readers, the most famous of which is the Amazon Kindle (that’s plain old “Kindle,” as separate and distinct from “Kindle Fire”). These have monochrome screens that use “electronic ink,” which is very easy on the eyes, looks pretty much like normal book print, and consumes very little battery power. Tablet computers, by contrast, such as the Kindle Fire, use color LCD screens. The upside is that they can be used not only for e-books, but also for viewing the Web, movies, games, and so on. The downside is that they use more electricity than electronic ink, and they also lack its crisp, eye-friendly, print-like appearance.

An alert Tribune reader sent me a news story that estimates that 24 million tablets will be sold this year. Holy smokes, I had no idea the market was that hot. That’s pretty close to the expected tally of 29 million for notebook computer for the year. Forrester Research was cited as the source for these estimates.

Meanwhile, I caught a story that says Amazon might have sold 250,000 Kindle Fire tablets in its first week on the market, which is to say, since last week. There is endless discussion about whether the Kindle Fire will be serious competition for Apple’s iPad, but you can consult the Web for that stuff, since the Web is pretty well-suited for endless discussions.

Yet another reader made this observation, which I think summarizes the gig pretty well. She said that tablets are good for consuming media, but they are not ideal for producing it.

But recently I encountered a potentially productive use for a tablet. One of my friends saw me herding two ungainly boxes worth of Chinese flash cards into my attaché, and asked why I don’t just computerize that stuff and use a tablet for the gig.

Well, in fact, I had started to computerize some of that information a couple of years ago. But using a computer proved to be every bit as ungainly as using physical cards is.

However, if I had a nimble little tablet at hand, hey, that’s a mighty interesting idea. True, I have no idea how to do that in the Android operating system that is commonly used on the lower-priced tablets. It must be a common enough task, though, since there are all sorts of applications on the Web being showcased for making flash cards.

And for this use, a small screen would be handier, hence more useful, than the bigger-screen (and more expensive) tablets. If I had confidence that the software side of things would work out, I could drop a couple of hundred bucks into the hardware side of things. The next step, if I’m logical about things, will be to get the software to make flash cards, then find somebody with an Android device so I can test the concept before buying a tablet. Such are the complexities of trying to simplify things.

If I do join the tablet craze it will be Chinese flash cards that pushed me there. Well, that and e-mail from some Tribune readers who are, alas, far ahead of me on this topic. This is a good combination of factors since many folks on Saipan are, in fact, studying various languages, including Chinese. I don’t know if I’ll make any progress in the tablet and flash card realm, but if I do, I’ll let you know.

Visit Ed Stephens Jr. at [URL=”http://tropicaled.com”]TropicalEd.com. Ed is a pilot, economist, and writer. He holds a degree in economics from UCLA and is a former U.S. naval officer. His column runs every Friday.