Little T in the Cog mobile

Needs More Work...

2011-09-12

Having used this tablet for a few weeks now it has become apparent that I can't quite use it as a replacement for my old PowerBook as an oncall device. That's a real pity as it is nice and light (against a laptop) and has really good battery life plus a decent enough screen res to be really useful in this roll.

There are a bunch of things missing that make it not ideal - the biggest of which is the lack of an RDP client (my work uses VDI desktops that we access using RDP). Even if I did have an RDP client however life still isn't perfect - the on screen keyboard lacks a few keys (no arrow keys, no control key, no esc key) which makes it pretty impossible to do any work on the Linux command line (try using the CLI without a control key - it gets pretty unusable pretty quickly!). I can get around that by using the bluetooth keyboard (which still has no esc key but I've since discovered out how to get out of insert mode in VI without it) but then I've now got an extra bit of gear to carry around with me which although being nice and light doesn't fit in the sleeve of my small carry pack when the TouchPad is also in there. There are also some annoying quirks with the keyboard (the arrow keys don't work in every app, you can't use ctrl + c, v etc to copy/paste) which hopefully will be addressed by a patch soon, either official or homebrew.

It still is a fabulous video device (now I've installed the open source TouchPlayer which can play pretty much any movie format) and with the help of the command line I can now mount my NAS drive using CIFS so I can stream any movies to the TouchPad while I lie in bed. It is also still a fabulous web browsing device too, flash works really well and most sites render as they would on my laptop. I certainly don't regret buying it, but for now I still carry my laptop around when on call.