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mark :: blog
For a two day trip I decided to test using my Android tablet instead of
also taking a laptop, and it worked out okay for the most part.
I was booked to go to Red Hat HQ in Raleigh, NC at the start of August for a
two-day business trip, well more accurately two-days in the office and another
two-days of travelling. I'd usually take my trusty ThinkPad x201 on the trip
with me, it's small and light, but it's battery life isn't so great anymore.
Earlier this year I'd bought an Android tablet, an ASUS Transformer Prime which
with a long battery life would be perfect for movies, but could it replace my
ThinkPad completely and save me travelling with two devices? I worked through
my requirements and it seemed plausible in theory, so here is how it stacked up
in practice:
- Connectivity. In the UK you can only buy the Prime with the keyboard
dock, the keyboard dock is great. The in-built wifi was okay for the airport,
hotel, and office. I carry a USB network adapter anyway just in case the hotel
has a physical connection. The wifi signal on the Prime is terrible compared to
other things (like a phone) though, so be prepared to walk around a bit to the
best signal. Partial Win.
- In flight entertainment.
I wanted something to watch movies (as US Airways transatlantic don't yet have
seat-back video, really!).
The large internal memory meant I could store a
few films in decent quality to watch and battery life wasn't a problem. I'd used
the tablet continously (without wifi) with the keyboard connected for 6
hours and wasn't even down to 50% battery. Although hardware decoding of videos
was a bit hit-and-miss, and after trying a dozen apps only "BS Player" seemed to
do a reasonable job. A couple of the movies I'd brought had low audio and I
couldn't figure out a way to boost it enough to hear over the noise of the plane,
even with decent in-ear noise blocking headphones. Having the keyboard dock
helped considerably as with the tablet on the tray-table I could set a decent
angle to watch a movie. Win.
- Reading material. I had a few papers and magazines to read which I'd
preloaded onto the tablet in PDF format. The Adobe PDF viewer is
acceptable, but it seems a little sluggish for something running on a
quad-core processor, and the screen resolution isn't really good enough
for magazines. The new Transformer Infinity would help here. Partial Win.
- Keeping in touch with home. The standard Android GMail app and Facebook
app are okay, and I was able to use GMail talk to have video chats with
my family from both the hotel and office. Win.
- Working. With just a couple days away I figured all that was needed was
the ability to read and send email and browse intranet internal web pages. The
standard VPN client on the Prime worked perfectly, and along with the Firefox
beta app gave me perfect access to internal sites. For email I prefer
command-line text-window clients anyway, so I just needed to be able to connect
to a work machine. "Connectbot" on Android works well enough for ssh, and there
are a few forked versions you can get that work with the Prime keyboard. The
AndChat app works for irc. Win.
- Presentations. I was giving a presentation at a meeting, but fortunately
they had a laptop set up with the projector and I didn't need to worry about
taking a HDMI lead and hoping it was a recent projector. Unexpectedly I needed
to edit an existing OpenOffice presentation to remove a couple of slides and
then convert to PDF to send to another company. I had to ask a colleague to do
it for me. There are apps that can view OpenOffice files, but no native
OpenOffice suite for android. I'd probably make sure I had access to a VNC
server in the future and use a VNC client for anything like this. Fail.
- Privacy. My thinkpad has full-disk encryption but I didn't bother for
Android as I wasn't going to be storing anything sensitive on the machine. My
thinkpad has a 3M privacy filter, which is great for airplanes and airports to
stop people either side and behind you looking at your screen. The same filters
do exist for Android, but are not as straightforward (it of couse only works in
one orientation and attaches like a screen protector, so isn't the easiest thing
to continuously take on and off, and forces you to use your screen in portrait
mode for everything). Fail.
- Printing a boarding card. When it was time to return home I was able to
use Firefox to check in online, and printing my boarding passes gave me a PDF
file. I didn't have any printer apps set up, but it was easy enough to email a
PDF to a colleague to print for me. Partial Win.
So in summary I think I got away with it; having just the tablet didn't stop me
doing anything that had to be done on the trip and I'll definately do the same
thing again in the future for very short trips. For anything more than a couple
of days or where connectivity might be an issue I'd miss having a full-featured
OS.
Created: 28 Sep 2012
Tagged as: fedora, redhat, trips
3 comments
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Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my
thoughts and opinions on my security
work, open source, fedora, home automation,
and other topics.
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trips
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So I was in Portugal this week and had once more, to take both netbook and iPad. The same issues as you - weight and flexibility, Android 4.0.x doesn't win for me - just too inflexible, the iPad wins hands down but I can't edit slides so the only thing I had to do was take the netbook which sucks.