My Tablet Tipping Point
The Apple iPad came out in 2010 and since then there have been many other players in the game. At the time, I thought they were pretty neat when I tried them out, but I haven’t figured out what kind of use I had for them. At the time, it would be useful for me as a reader and video player which weren’t enough for me to pull the trigger.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to try out various tablets and try to incorporate them into my daily activities to see how they fared. For the most part, they’ve been reduced to game playing devices solely used to pass time. They weren’t the productivity workflow game changer I was hoping for.
At one point I had a chance to get my hands on the 1st generation iPad Pro and Pencil. I was fairly impressed with how the accessory performed with the tablet. There was a bit of hope for daily productivity integration. In the end, it turned out being way too big for me.
Fast forward to 2018 when Apple announced the Pencil to be compatible with the non-pro line and at that point it put tablets back in my radar again. At the time, I had just started my new job, and was trying to be better at my meeting note taking to actionable items workflow.
On top of this, my lingering amazement at how well Adobe took Lightroom to the cloud from my experiences with it drove my curiosity with a tablet device further. I wondered if it was possible to offload most of a variety of my work and home workflows onto it.
To better understand what I’m looking for in a tablet device, let’s look at some of the things I typically do on a daily basis nowadays…
- Jot down notes from meetings (typically on post-its) which then are later translated into Trello or OneNote
- Diagrams or sketches that get digitized by using my mobile phone which then gets uploaded to the cloud for desktop access
- Correspondence through Outlook and Slack
- Photography post-production (transfer files to Adobe Cloud, flag photos to be edited, edit photos)
- Present design ideas in person or in a Zoom conference
- Writing about things that will some day make it out onto this blog
And so here we are. Since acquiring the iPad, aside from replacing paper/pen, I’ve been approaching it as a laptop replacement for my day-to-day to better understand the niceties as well as the pain points in trying to do so. So far, the experience has been positive and I’ve been able to successfully execute on most of my mentioned daily activities. I’ll have a better idea a couple months from now as to how viable the iPad is for me, and I’ll attempt to remember to revisit this topic for a longer term evaluation.
