Living a Week With a Tablet and No Phone; Pain Became a Close Friend

Imagine you’re standing in a room in which all four walls are covered with brand names and logos of the big players and the little guys in the tech industry. Now imagine yourself blindfolded, spinning around three times and throwing a dart on any of those walls in that room. You’ll un-blindfold yourself and see which company the dart’s landed on. Chances are that company’s made a tablet or has plans for a tablet at the very least.

Most of the tablets that are out there have a phone feature, with the notable exception of the iPad. Wondering if this feature is useful and if a tablet with a phone function can completely replace cell phones, I ran a little experiment where I gave up the use of my ever-faithful iPhone (sorry, little guy) and hung out with an OlivePad to begin with. I started the experiment on a Friday and ended it the following Thursday.

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Only after profusely apologizing to my iPhone of course

The Friday that I gave up my phone and adopted the OlivePad, my life was pure miserable. Perhaps it was the fault of the piece I had but applications weren’t running smoothly, games were framing and more painfully, the Gmail application refused to sync with my Gmail account (come on Android!). To add garam masala and green chillies to the total bheja fry that was happening, the phone function literally made me cry. Accepting phone calls was a pain because I’d let the tablet/phone ring, scuttle around for the handsfree, connect it and in the process miss the call. The other option was to keep the handsfree connected but you wouldn’t be able to hear the tablet/phone ring unless the handsfree was constantly in your ears. You’d have to otherwise go by the tablet/phone’s vibrations. Like I said, a bheja breakdown happened on Friday but I plodded on, thinking that being a girl with a piece of technology, I needed some time to get used to it.

This was not to be of course. Why would it? I even went out to dinner and a bar over the weekend and yanking the tablet out of my bag every time I felt the phone ring was embarrassing. On top of that, if you’re the coordinator of your group and you can’t take a phone call, your social life might start deteriorating. Clearly tablets and make AND break your social life.

Come Monday morning, I came back to the office and I threw a tantrum and threatened destruction and got the OlivePad switched out with the Samsung Galaxy Tab. This was a welcome change as the Galaxy Tab was a lot smoother and friendlier. Playing games was nicer, Gmail was nicer, calls were still a pain but at that point I got used to the (frustrating) process. I even took tablet-ing a step further and updated my Wordpress blog from it, which surprisingly was a much smoother experience than Wordpress for iPhone. A simple process like social networking was so much smoother on the Galaxy Tab and I honestly prefer to tweet from a tablet than a phone. I took notes in meetings, took pictures to make presentations and even did some light image editing with applications. To have the abilities with me on the go would totally make me break my piggy bank for a tablet.