Tablets

Today my impatiently awaited Nexus 7 tablet arrived (Yay!).

I have been toying with the idea of a tablet for some time now, particularly since I saw mrtonylee's first edition iPad, but they have always been a little too expensive to tempt me to part with the shekels. Last summer, ellefurtle treated herself to the "new" iPad and it rather set me off again. Again, though, the expense gave me pause.

When Amazon launched the Kindle Fire and it got me to thinking about it all again. Almost immediately they issued the Kindle Fire HD with what appeared to be unseemly haste after the long delay in bringing the Fire across the Pond and that made me dither again. It's smaller than the standard tablets, all of which are about the same shape and size of the iPad, and I tend to view quick updates with immense suspicion; it rather suggests that there's something not quite right that they are not being forthcoming over. Add to that the fact that a seemingly unmissable deal from Amazon just before Christmas suddenly revealed itself (to my eyes at any rate) as a piece of ambush marketing and I backed off yet again. To add to the mix, by this time the iPad Mini had arrived on the scene and a couple of friends were suggesting the Nexus 7 as an alternative to both.

What to do, what to do?

Although I am not conscious of making the decision, I think that somewhere down the line I started favouring the idea of the smaller tablets over the full-sized ones, simply from a lazy point of view. When you are lounging in bed reading on a tablet, or browsing the web etc, the full size option is surprisingly heavy and unweildy. It works best if you put it on your lap, in the crook of your arm, or on a table top. All of which sounds like a different series of computers entirely.

And then I saw the promotion in The Times. Take out an 18 month subscription to the online version and they will flog you a Nexus 7 for £50. Obviously this only works if you read The Times, because the price of the subscription plus the price of the tablet (albeit heftily subsidised) work out just a little more expensive than the Nexus 7 on its own. But - if you actually read the paper, it is suddenly a very good deal. The subscription covers all six daily copies of the weekly paper, plus the Sunday Times and is cheaper than buying weekday editions in traditional format, so you get two extra newspapers a week for less. Plus a tablet computer.

And since I have been reading The Times since the early 1980s my decision was suddenly much more simple.

So here it is:



My Nexus 7 as photographed by iPhone 4 and displayed on...