Preliminary Notes on the Philly.com Tablet

I've recently acquired an Arnova tablet, purchased via Philly.com.  It part of a package deal.  You get the tablet for an extremely low price, but with a contract to pay a monthly fee to subscribe to the Philadelphia papers on it.  Check out the details at www.phillytablet.com.


Tablets require hand / eye coordination so it has taken me little longer than usual to get the hang of things, and it has capabilities that I haven't used.  For instance, the specs say you can watch movies on it but I haven't tried that yet.  In fact I've done very little other than read the paper on it.  My morning commute routine now includes downloading the paper on to the tablet before I leave the house and then reading it on the train.  Reading the physical paper on the train has always been beyond my abilities -- too much folding and unfolding and refolding, so I have been reading the paper when I get home in the evening. 

I check Philly.com as part of my "get ready for work" routine but that only has a few stories on it.  I get some of the highlights there and then read the rest on the tablet.  I get a digital copy of the paper as well, delivered to my email but it just isn't feasible for my old eyes to read it on a computer screen.  I use the Philly app.  I can select the section of the paper I want to read and the stories appear in a menu.  I can pull up the first one, read it, and then just scroll through with a wave of one finger.  Pictures come through, though I can't always seem them well, usually due to the angle I hold the tablet. 

The tablet uses wireless so I don't have constant Internet access, but once the paper is downloaded I can read it wherever whenever.  There aren't updates, however, so you still need to check philly.com during the day, or subscribe to the paper's twitter feed, to get the latest news. 

I had thought about making the tablet my newstand, perhaps trying to read the New Yorker, which also gives me a digital subscription, but it requires an Internet connection to read online -- no download, and the layout is hard for me to read. Perhaps there are options but if so I've missed them; perhaps it just needs more investigation.  You can also get book readers on the tablet and download books.  I haven't done that yet either.

The tablet has become so much a part of my routine that even on the weekends I am more likely to sit down with it than to trot down the driveway and retrieve the paper.  I do miss the ads a little, and not all of the comics I like to read are included, but overall I'm getting more and more comfortable with the tablet.  Mr. J asked when I got the tablet if I was ready to cancel our print subscription.  I wasn't, but next time he asks the answer may be different. 

My only real problem with the tablet, other than the occasional bug that requires a restart, is that it has messed up my train reading routine.  I used to reserve train time for magazines and haven't reworked that yet, so I'm weeks behind on the New Yorker.  That's a time management problem, though, and not the paper's problem.

If you've been thinking about getting one of these I would recommend giving it a try, or considering it as a gift for the newsy and nerdy.   You can get Android aps for the tablet so there are a lot of other things you can do with it.  It comes loaded with a few other services / features but I haven't really used those either.  Read more at www.phillytablet.com.