Anyone else use a roughty toughty personal phone for biking (thinking Samsung Solid) and a tablet at home / work for other comms.

I’m considering changing my iphone to a “phone”, and perhaps investing on a Kindle Fire HD (I use a Kindle on my work journey’s) for little more than reading, occasional browsing, email and of course STW.

I’d be interested in hearing anyone’s real world pro’s and cons….

INteresting way of justifying a tablet purchase!

And I thought you were all “Anti-material” these days (not meant in any particle physics way)

🙂

I have a pair of Crackberries. (Work and personal). The personal phone is just that, a communication device. I then have a tablet for travelling. Films, web, email, games etc. It’s ace! Also means that when travelling for work, my work laptop and phone can go in the hold when I’m flying at the weekend! 🙂

Was thinking of the same – an HP Touchpad and a smaller, robust, phone as a wifi hotspot.

Xperia Go maybe, also it doesn’t actually look too strong.

Motorola Razr Maxx looks very good, but it isn’t that small. But it is a bit more robust and somewhat water resistant.

Only trouble is my Desire only just fits in my road saddlebag, so the Razr might be a tight fit.

CFH, you almost touch on my point. My iphone doesn’t work (little to no signal after being dropped several times) and I don’t want to see my work emails on the crackberry as I stop for tea/cake.

Yet my smartphone of choice (i5) I don’t want to chuck in my lighweight and therefore uni-pocketed Camelback LR with my tools, or risk in my road pocket (from a getting wet perspective).

It seems the simple solution is a water/shock proof phone. £70 on amazon, plus £199 for the KFHD = £269 versus a 24month upgrade cost of £1083 to the i5. Note also I haven’t take the phone upgrade so this keeps my monthy’s to £17.

Cynic-Al, this IS dependant on a variable work bonus appearing in November. And if I was being materialistic it’d be iphone 5 and ipad all the way….. I call this option the utilitarian one.

The final thing that affects my thinking is that me and the outlaws will club together to get Mrs K the ipad she’s always wanted at Christmas – we therefore don’t need 2 in one house.

Just airing my thoughts, it sounds sensible to me at least…..

TBH,

I’ve long held that this is the way forward. I’m not really a fan of convergence.

You’ve got a pretty insurmountable problem in that you ideally need a nice big screen for PDA duties but something nice and pocketable to make phone calls on. Until we invent pop-up screens, these are mutually exclusive requirements.

Back in ‘the day’, my Every Day Carry was the smallest phone I could get my hands on (last one I had was a Nokia 6510, the ‘business’ version of the 8310) and a Psion 5.

The Psion 5 was, for its time, a proper workhorse; I could tether it to the phone, albeit slowly, for Internet connectivity, and it ostensibly filled a good chunk of the niche currently occupied by tablets these days. It was small enough to live in a coat pocket, but was big enough (and with a proper keyboard) to do some real work on it. Then when I was going, say, out on the beers or to a gig, I could keep my phone in my jeans pocket and leave my expensive device safe at home.

As a system, for me, it worked really well. Sadly the Psion got long in the tooth and I went through a series of replacement converged devices (O2 Mini-S, TyTN II, couple of early Android handsets) before finding something that came vaguely close to fulfilling promises made for years by manufacturers.

My current phone is a modern miracle, and I’ve waxed lyrical about it before. But I think if someone came out with something like a Nexus 7, the size of a paperback book and in a clamshell design with a keyboard, I reckon I’d ditch it in a heartbeat in favour a Psion form factor PDA and a separate teenyphone.

Cougar – Member – My current phone is a modern miracle, and I’ve waxed lyrical about it before

I’m intrigued – what is it?

It’s a HTC Sensation, but for the purposes of that post you could read ‘most modern smartphones’ I guess. The previous post I was referring to is this one.

The final thing that affects my thinking is that me and the outlaws will club together to get Mrs K the ipad she’s always wanted at Christmas – we therefore don’t need 2 in one house.

Don’t you bet on it…..

My work phone is an iPhone but m personal/biking one is a £10 Nokia that does what I need – make/receive calls & texts. At home, it’s an iPad for general interweb, reading, games etc – the Mrs as one too as we found we both wanted to use it a the same time. :-/

Nobby, worth remembering I could still surf on my KFHD and I still have <this> macbook.

Out of interest, do you swap the sim card when biking or use a different PAYG number?

I could use my laptop or PC. but find I don’t……

Different number on a PAYG.

Stop the press though!

i’ve just seen the new ipod touch. All the iphone content and size, including cameras and facetime, mail and facebook, yet no phone.

So this and a bashable phone could be the trick? Although the KFHD is more of a reading size…

i’ve just seen the new ipod touch

Am I reading that right? It’s basically a slimline iPhone 5, minus the phone bit, for 200 quid? Permanently tethered to a dispose-o-phone, that seems a pretty bargainous way of doing things to me.

Yup, check it out…

http://www.apple.com/uk/ipod-touch/features/

I’m thinking keep my 3GS as the bargain phone and… ta da!

Kryton @ your age you may find the screen a tad small 😉

You mean i need to carry this around?

Is it 4g?

My iPod Touch is now, mostly, an expensive mp3 player although it was useful on holiday last year in the States for maps etc

At £250+ I’d spend the extra £80 & get an iPad 2.

As an aside, if you’ve speakers or other accessory that you use with your iPhone they’ll not work with the Ipod 5 as it’s now got the Lightning connector that iPhone 5 users are moaning about. They do, of course, sell an adapter to get around this…..

I don’t Nobby. Beside, Mrs K has used woman logic to solve the issue like this:

a) Any of my above scenarios = 2 devices.

b) Just get an i5 and use the work phone as the “bike” phone. That way if it gets wet / damaged its replaced for free (bit naughty but hey)

I said, what about my Kindle-reading. She said, well, you have a Kindle don’t you?

Hard to argue with really.