The Perfect Tool for Bloggers

Since the begging of blogging times, laptops have been bloggers’ tools of choice. And why not? Laptops provide a facsimile of the desktop experience while allowing users to roam wherever they please. Bloggers with day jobs could tote their laptops to work and write on lunch break. Work from home types could actually get out of the house and write somewhere else. Essentially, owning a laptop frees people from the confines of their desks and gives them more freedom. But as always, technology evolves. While laptops still serve bloggers well, there’s a relatively new tool that can provide an even better blogging experience.

Welcome the tablet

While many tried in the past, no company succeeded in creating a tablet PC until Apple released the iPad in 2010. They set the tone for the tablet market to come, and then completely stepped up the game with the iPad 2 in 2011. With a more powerful processor and better screen resolution, the iPad 2 became the first tablet PC that could reasonably replace a laptop for non-hardcore users.

Since then many manufacturers have come to market with Android tablets. These come in all sizes, and are growing in power all the time. Now that Google has unleashed the Ice Cream Sandwich OS, Android tablets could get even better. That means users will have many choices in their tablet selection. For the most part, Android tablets and the iPad alike can take the place of a laptop for bloggers.

Portability

Laptops caught on, because they were essentially shrunken down desktops. This gave them unprecedented portability, a feature attractive to many users. As described above, that was a huge appeal to bloggers, especially in the beginning. Now that blogging has become a full-time gig for many, portability has become an even bigger asset. Yet tablets do it a bit better.

While laptops are small, that’s only a relative term. They’re small compared to the most familiar form of computer, the desktop. But when compared to tablets they’re downright clunky. Tablets are the ultimate in portability. Some 7-inch tablets can even fit in jacket pockets. Even larger tablets, such as the iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, can easily fit in purses and small backpacks. Tablets are also considerably thinner and lighter than laptops, making them the ultimate devices for portability.

Battery life

Leave a laptop unplugged for a couple of hours and you’ll be scrambling to find the nearest power outlet. If you’ve forgotten your charger — and every laptop owner has done this at least once — and you’re completely out of luck. You can do a couple of things to preserve battery life, but it makes only a few minutes’ difference. That laptop will die within three to four hours max, and older laptops with older batteries will last even shorter.

Tablets, on the other hand, have phenomenal battery life. They can last 10 hours even with relatively regular usage. They also don’t expel much battery life when put to sleep. And, with recent trends in energy efficiency, tablet battery lives will get even better. If Motorola can squeeze 21 hours out of the Razr Maxx smartphone, then tablet batteries stand to last even longer in the future. This means there’s less of a worry about a dead battery.

(Plus, since many tablets use familiar charging ports — the iPad uses the iPod one, and Android tablets use mini-USB — there’s a chance you can find someone near you who can lend you a little charge.)

Software

One concern for bloggers is that tablets won’t have the software they need to ply their crafts. After all, they need a text editor, maybe an HTML editor, an image editor, a web browser, and more. There’s nothing to worry about, though. Both iPad and Android tablets have robust application markets that can take care of pretty much any issue. Many times basic applications are even free.

There’s also no concern about blogging software. Both Android and iPad have powerful browsers, too, that almost exactly resemble the everyday browser used on laptops. It’s easy to log into WordPress and other content management systems. This isn’t like the mobile app, either, where there is reduced function. Literally everything you can do on the web you can do from a tablet.

(Well, except one thing, but we’ll get to that.)

Remaining concerns

Yes, there are still some reasonable concerns when switching from a laptop to a tablet. Here are just a few of them.

• Familiarity. Laptops ran the same operating systems as desktops, so they were familiar to us. Tablets, however, run different operating systems. While they might be unfamiliar at first, they are highly intuitive operating systems. Touchscreen navigation is phenomenal — far better than click and point.
• Flash. This is the issue referred to above. The iPad doesn’t run Flash, and while Android does, it’s a pretty poor experience. Plus, Adobe has ceased supporting Flash for mobile devices. Soon enough HTML5 will take the place of Flash, though, so this worry is only a temporary one.
• Storage. Tablets max out at 64GB typically. That might be enough for some, but it’s certainly not enough for those with big media collections. The cloud does help, though.
• Keyboard. Virtual keyboards can be tough to adapt to, since they don’t provide tactile feedback. Yet most tablet users find that typing on a large virtual keyboard is actually comfortable. For those who need the physical device, Bluetooth keyboards can be relatively cheap and just as portable as the tablet itself.

While bloggers haven’t turned full bore to tablets yet, we will see more of this phenomenon in 2012. People will become more familiar with tablets, which will break down the greatest barrier. After that we could see the market adopt tablets as they did laptops. It will be a great revolution for bloggers everywhere.

Joe Pawlikowski is the editor of Prepaid Reviews, a site that provides news, commentary, and reviews of prepaid wireless services.

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Tagged as: bloggers, Blogging, Blogging Tools, work from home

Article by Joe Pawlikowski

Joe has written 5 articles .

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