Technology

[snuz]

I'm considering buying a iPad and pencil to use to take notes on pdfs and other research. Plus, an iPad will be so much easy for reading that my laptop. I'm wondering if this sounds like a good idea, or if I'm just looking for an excuse to buy more technology. Thoughts?

[Sigaba]

On 3/12/2017 at 2:30 PM, snuz said:

I'm considering buying a iPad and pencil to use to take notes on pdfs and other research. Plus, an iPad will be so much easy for reading that my laptop. I'm wondering if this sounds like a good idea, or if I'm just looking for an excuse to buy more technology. Thoughts?

What's your back up plan if the iPad breaks or disappears?

Is your institution/department Mac or PC?

[snuz]

21 hours ago, Sigaba said:

What's your back up plan if the iPad breaks or disappears?

Is your institution/department Mac or PC?

What do you mean by my backup plan? I don't intend to store anything on it. I just want to make the concentration of my work easier to do.

[Sigaba]

1 hour ago, snuz said:

What do you mean by my backup plan? I don't intend to store anything on it. I just want to make the concentration of my work easier to do.

Your intentions may change. (Even if you plan to use primarily cloud storage, you might be well served by having a back up in your physical possession.)

But if they don't, what's your plan for a worst-case scenario? That 0.001% event that won't happen until the worst possible moment?

A ball point pen goes dry, you just grab another pen. A stylus goes bad, the device won't turn on just as you're about to take the most important notes of your academic life.

[rising_star]

I'll just say that Amazon's web hosting business (which turns out to supply the servers for MANY things) were down for most of a work day not long ago. If everything I had was in the cloud, I would've been SOL for doing work for that period of time (which was more than half the day). Just something to keep in mind if your plan is to depend entirely on the cloud.

[snuz]

On 3/14/2017 at 11:04 PM, Sigaba said:

Your intentions may change. (Even if you plan to use primarily cloud storage, you might be well served by having a back up in your physical possession.)

But if they don't, what's your plan for a worst-case scenario? That 0.001% event that won't happen until the worst possible moment?

A ball point pen goes dry, you just grab another pen. A stylus goes bad, the device won't turn on just as you're about to take the most important notes of your academic life.

I still really only want to use it for reading and taking notes on pdfs. I have a laptop, but like I said, since I'll be doing a significant amount of reading, I want to make that easier than is possible on my computer. That is my only real reason for wanting to use a tablet. It's not going to be something I rely on as my primary device.