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Originally Posted by dmaul111478
Battery life--needs to be 8-10 hours so I can use it for a full day and not have to worry about having to carry the ac adapter around
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Battery life is always a consideration, and the more the better. However, over the many years I've been using portable devices I've found a few solutions:
1. Unless the battery is built in and non removable it's not a big deal to carry a spare battery for longer haul trips.
2. Most devices aren't 'pocket portable' but still need to be carried in some kind of case or briefcase. These typically have side pockets, so carrying the charging cable isn't necessarily much of a problem.
3. For repeating situations (i.e. going to an office) it may not be a big deal to have two charging cables - one at each end as it were.
4. Unless you do really long days with a machine then you can often do fine with a lot less than 10 hours battery life.
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Instant on and the general speediness of the device is also a baseline, as I don't want to wait for programs to open etc.
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That's a big plus if you turn on and off a lot (which I'm guilty of). I really like the sound of the iPad in that regard. I'm still getting used to leaving my e-ink reader on more. It's partly a management issue too - my tablet computer has all manner of power saving settings for when I might leave it for a while. I'm still working through the best settings, because my usage pattern is very erratic. I guess it's a trade off - as I don't have any problems with battery life I've been a bit slack about optimising the off/on/sleep/ settings.
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Portrait mode is too narrow--especially for reading A4 PDFs which is a big need of mine. It also makes it hard for apps to be optimized to work well in portrait or landscape--which is easy with a 4:3 screen like on the iPad.
They'll be great if one just wants to surf the net and watch video as their main use, and thus just uses it in land scape.
But for me I want a 4:3 screen or something pretty close to that so both portrait and landscape modes are equally useful.
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That's one reason that I went for a 12" screen. It's flexible enough to do it all. For most of my usage the wider format is absolutely fine "as is". A longer page of text works fine. However, on those occasions that I do particularly want to use portrait in an A4 shape, as it were, I can just resize to suit. With the bigger screen, there really isn't a problem doing that, because you have plenty of real estate to work with. You end up with the same usable/viewable size as you would have got with a smaller screen in 4:3 format.
None of the devices I've looked at are perfect in every respect, but most have work-arounds that make then usable. We all have somewhat different needs and preferences though, so it boils down to working out which fall into the "absolutely must have" category, and which can be put into "would like, but will accept some variation" box. Sometimes it's not that easy to completely nail down which is which until you've had some hands on time.
Cheers,
Chris