Sam-sung blue...

A somewhat disgruntling day.

The Samsung Note 10.1 tablet which has become one essential keystone of my persional ICT ecology (if I may mix metaphors) has never had any security on its startup screen. The whole point of it is instant access; switch on and swipe the screen, or just pull out the stylus, and hey presto I'm working. Content is all on the cloud, not the device, and anything confidential is password encrypted anyway. If I lose the tablet itself, or if it is stolen, I lose no data security.

This morning, in an idle moment, whilst adjusting another setting entirely, I suddenly decided to explore the startup security options which I have never used.

First I tried pattern locking. Select one of over 4500 ways to connect dots in a grid; give a four digit PIN as a back up access method; repeat same pattern to unlock. This worked well. Having tried it out, I switched it off again.

Next was signature recognition; I was asked to sign on the screen three times, so that the machine could store a generalised version. I switched off, then on again, and tried to get in by signing the lock screen. No dice: however many times I tried, it wouldn't recognise my scrawl. Ah, well, no matter ... after five failed attempts, I just entered the four digit pin and got in that way, then removed the signature lock.

Finally, what should be simplest and most secure option: password locking.

Since this was only an idle experiment, I entered a simple, impossible to forget sequence of letters ("abcdefgh"), wrote it down on a slip of paper to be sure, confirmed it when requested, exited settings, and switched off. Switched back on again, entered my sequence. And ... it was rejected.

After five abortive tries, I thought I would be offered the PIN option ... but no. I was made to wait thirty seconds before trying another five times with equal lack of success.

On my twenty seventh try the same sequence was, suddenly, accepted and I was in. Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I went straight to settings to remove the password locking option ... but, to do so, I had to first reënter the password which was again rejected repeatedly.

Finally (to cut a long, tedious and tearstained story short) I was forced to hard reset the tablet. That lost me all data ... nothing irreplaceable, but it meant spending the rest of today reinstalling applications, altering settings, and generally recreating a working environment evolved over the last year or so.

All's well that ends well ... but this is, nevertheless, my first black mark against Samsung and I shall never again play with a setting I don't need.

Keep taking the tablets (2)

OK ... continuing from my initial post in this thread ... Question 1 (from Clarissa Vincent, Frank Jones and Zuleika Ferris in particular): what contribution does a tablet, as such, make to my personal ICT ecosystem? This has to be the core of the thing; unless a tablet, in and of itself, does something which I need, it will be dead weight. So; here, in no particular order, are (to keep things short) four of the many praises I could sing:

• I spend a fair amount of time in meetings. I tend to make meeting notes on paper and type them up afterwards, so a keyboard isn't a necessity here. I do, however, use a computer as a reference resource: everything from the agenda to retrieving statistics, reports, collateral information related to whatever is being discussed. A conventional clamshell, even a small netbook, sits between its user and the rest of the table like a barrier; it changes group dynamics. A tablet, lying flat on the table, however, has no such effect. Furthermore, mouse and keyboard have a distracting effect which fingers moving discretely across the surface of a flat tablet avoid.

• I make a lot of use of visual material (maps, charts, plots, photographs), both on my own and in discussion with others. A tablet provides a far more intuitive way to interact with such material – especially when several people are interacting. Just before writing this, I was talking to a dive master, a fishing boat captain and a marine biologist about plans for a sea bed search; all four of us, as we talked, were interactively pinching and zooming and panning a composite satellite image and seabed chart to illustrate our own points or explore and understand each others. you can't do that on a conventional display. The same is true in discussing concepts with groups of students.

• Despite my repeatedly aired æsthetic preference for paper books over digital, I do use e-readers for many practical purposes ... and unlike most people I talk to, I find the quality of reading experience on the tablet far superior to that on an e-ink device. There is also the advantage that I am not tied into any one format or content provider; I have a virtual Kindle, so can buy and Kindle texts, but can equally well move to any other alternative as required. Switching back and forth between books is quick and easy compared to any of the dedicated devices, too. Then there are the same advantages of quick and easy resizing as I mentioned in connection with maps and so on: reading a paper, I can enlarge a diagram to exactly the right size for close examination with a flick of finger and thumb, then return the page to normal reading size just as quickly. I have to admit that weight and size are greater (but I'm carrying it anyway, for the other reasons listed here), and battery life shorter (but still plenty long enough; I'll cover this later, in another section) than in a Kindle or equivalent reader, but find the trade offs more than worthwhile.

• A tablet is a wonderful replacement for a photographic portfolio. I can carry as many sets and sequences of pictures as I like, without any weight penalty beyond the table itself – and the display quality is superb. When my niece asked to see a particular sequence a couple of days ago, in a pub, in the middle of a meal, it was no problem to do so. When an editor who asked for one set suddenly shows an interest in another, I have them to hand.

Keep taking the tablets (1)

This is really a response to all those who have asked me, in greater or lesser degrees of puzzlement, why I have decided to use an Android tablet and what I plan to do with it. Or, rather (returning to this paragraph after finishing the post), it’s the first part of such a response.

I had watched the growth of tablet computing for a decade now, and stood back from it. I knew the value of such devices, employed them enthusiastically in certain educational and professional contexts, but could see no real place for one in my own personal ICT environment.

I had also seen, liked, and appreciated the potential of multitouch capacitative screen devices. These were, again, valuable in some educational and work niches but either too small or too large to be very useful to me as part of my own, personal kit. I do, as I’ve mentioned, use an iPod Touch ... but only because (a) it serves as a platform for the best pocket calculator I’ve yet found and (b) it is small enough to carry without noticing it.

Then came hybrid devices like the iPad. A cross between pocket and laptop computers, both of which are useful to me. Light and small enough to be carried as well as the netbook which is the cornerstone of my peripatetic life, but at the same time large enough to work on with both hands (rather than just the finger and thumb which a phone can accommodate). and to exploit the real potential of the technology, but small and light enough (unlike those superb one, two or four square metre laboratory and studio displays) to use on the road.

Not the iPad itself, however. Not for me, that is ... I know that it serves many people excellently well, and that’s great. For me, however, both of its manifestations so far are sitting around the place, truly beautiful things, but (thanks to the closed Apple business model) too annoyingly restrictive for my liking.

There are, of course, several alternatives to the Apple iPad. True tablet PCs, running Windows or Linux, are coming down in size and weight to challenge the iPad; I’ve tried out and seriously considered them. Those which use Windows have the very real advantage of running the same software as my other computing hardware ... and, in particular, allowing direct viewing and editing of files from my beloved WordPerfect (lack of which was drove me to abandon Linux as a netbook OS last year). But, there are other issues which caused me to turn away from that option. Battery life was one; the fact that I really can’t see myself making much use of my key Windows applications without a proper, physical keyboard is another. (That same point, by the way, has been made by several people with whom I've discussed this: “I prefer a physical keyboard” or “I have to do a lot of typing”.)

Android devices weren't a real alternative to the iPad until well into this year. There were Android tablets, but Android itself was strictly a phone sized OS and didn't scale up well to a larger screen, let alone the sorts of things for which it might be used. Then, towards the end of February, Android 3 (Honeycomb) arrived, and things started to look different. The OS was now ready to be considered usable for real work on large screens.

Even so, there were to start with almost no applications which yet made use of the improvements. There were only a couple of machines running it, too. I got hold of those devices which were available, and tried them out. After a while, I started asking around amongst friends who might have informed opinions, though most of them expressed interest in hearing, instead, what I might decide or discover.

Those early machines, though impressive in themselves, were not quite what I wanted. I've never been what the marketing people call an "early adopter"; I see no point in committing my life to what is available in the first days of a new idea when something better will almost certainly come along in time. And, after a few months, better did come along in several forms.

To cut a long story short, there were eventually two Android tablets between which I had to choose. Neither was perfect in every way, but both offered enough of what I needed to be worth settling on. They were a 180mm device (I won't identify it, since I ultimately decided against it for personal requirements and not on any fault of its own) and the Asus TF101 (aka Transformer).

From the start, I had taken it for granted that if I bought a tablet I would also end up using it with a BlueTooth keyboard (if that seems odd, I'll ask you to wait for a later section). But a keyboard of a useful size is bigger than a 180mm tablet, and a keyboard physically separate from its tablet is awkward to use compared to a laptop or netbook. The TF101 has a "dockable" keyboard: that is, one with physical attachment and support to present the tablet as if it were the screen on a conventional netbook, the two also folding flat together into a thin clamshell sandwich for storage or transit. This keyboard also houses a proper touchpad and buttons, two USB ports, and a full size SDHC card slot (in addition to a microSD slot on the tablet itself).

Furthermore, that TF101 keyboard contains an additional battery which extends usage considerably. It's intelligently wired, too. Plug the complete tablet and keyboard assembly into a power supply and the tablet charges first – so if only the tablet is required, it has all of the available charge. Use the complete assembly, and the power is drawn from the keyboard battery until it is drained, so the tablet retains its full charge for separate use. Use the tablet separately, and when its is reconnected t the keyboard it will draw power until again fully charged.

There are, of course, down sides to the TF101. The biggest is probably that it doesn't (at least in the version available to me) have its own 3G card for accessing cellular networks, as many of its competitors do. In an ideal world, I would have liked to have that option. However, I carry a portable WiFi hotspot router so when no open fixed network is available the TF101 can connect through that to a cellphone, 3G dongle, or satphone.

In the end, though, it wuz the TF101 wot won it.

To keep this down to a reasonable length, and to get it posted this side of doomsday, I'm going to break here. I'm aware that I've not answered most of the questions posed in the first paragraph, but they will follow under three headings (not necessarily three separate posts; we'll see how it goes):

1. Freestanding use as a tablet
2. Use alongside a netbook, as a supplement to it.
3. Occasional use as a netbook replacement.

(As I write and post each, I'll provide two way hyperlinks between them and this.)

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• Picture credit: that image on my Asus TF101 desktop, in the illustration above, is Lisa Milroy's haunting painting Searching Geisha. See the original, if you can.