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Society players know this issue best. We are the ones spending days at cons, three rounds on Saturday. That is why I asked in the Society messageboard.
I am trying to decide what to buy for reading paizo PDFs on the go.
Anyone care to advise/warn what devices do it well or poor?
I wanted to buy a cheap netbook on black friday but they are not carried/advertised much anymore in stores and I do not want to make an online purchase for this item. When I checked netbooks out last night. They were both weaker and more expensive than when i looked them over several months ago. Crazy, but that was the case. Maybe an effort by the store to make people want to spend even more for a laptop or tablet? I was leaning towards a netbook because of their long battery life. Something that could last me most if not the whole day at a con with three slots. I have no worry about them being weaker than a laptop. Laptops are way too short on battery life and more expensive. Now I am leaning towards the Ipad2 but it is damn expensive itself. At least it has a long battery life unlike a laptop. Thinking the 7 inch screen on a nook or kindle fire may be too small. I also do not know how well they can increase text size and/or zoom on a paizo pdf.
I figure the savings on paizo PDFs are strong enough to payoff the cost of a cheap netbook or tablet in a short time. It would take too long to pay off an Ipad2. Even if I buy more than I expect and save maybe $150 a year that would take at least 4 years to pay off that Ipad2 after: black friday sales(shallow), tax, and presuming no accessories(which I doubt), and rebuying the books i already own on pdf. Since I do not see myself using the Ipad2 for much beyond rpg pdfs, that makes the high cost hard to swallow. Still, my current impression is that it is the best device for such. I am getting tired of carrying the bulk and weight of all the paizo hard covers plus a few soft backs.
Thanks for any advice on any and all products people want to advise/warn on.
While I'm not sure about the new Nook Tablet, I can warn you off of the Nook Color.
When I first got mine, it read the Paizo PDFs beautifully but slow. With recent updates, their have been graphical glitches with any pages containing artwork. I've pretty muched abandoned mine in favor of my tiny screened iPhone (not for use at the table, just as a mobile anywhere reader). That said, the Goodreader app for iphone/ipad is EXCELLENT, so I recommend it with an iPad in your case.
Netbooks are great too, but besides for the battery life being shorter, make sure you get a 2GB ram version if you are running any kind of windows 7 on it (starter or normal versions).
I have no experience with a Kindle or Kindle Fire, but im not a fan of the android OS in general.
I'm thinking iPad2 myself. My GF offered me one for xmas should I want one. I'm still considering it.
I'm going through this myself right now. I'm down to 3 candidates:
Kindle Fire - The 7" screen isn't too bad, and it looks pretty good. The battery is supposed to last a good 6-7 hours. Also, because you can root the tablet, you can load up any apps that you find useful, including pdf readers. The downside is the relatively small mamory capacity (about 6Gb after the OS and it doesn't have an SD card slot), although if you can access a Wifi spot you can store an extra 5Gb for free on the Amazon cloud.
Acer Iconia 7" - This tablet is pretty good, has good reviews, and will be one of the first tablets to get the Android OS update early next year. I've been playing around with a borrowed one and it's pretty good. Not sure about the battery life on it. It normally sells for $330 but Best Buy will have it for $190 on Black Friday.
Acer Iconia 10.1" - Same deal as the 7" but bigger and more expensive. Usually goes for $400-ish but Staples will have it for $300 on Black Friday.
The iPad2 is nice, but I just can't justify the price point.
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Especially for the OP, the most major issue I had with the Ipad, as well as similar other products like the Toshiba Thrive is that they required ITunes to add stuff, including PDF's and pictures.
This was a huge problem for me (deployed) and would also probably be an issue if your goal is to use them at con games where new books/updates would likely be comming out.
I am interested in the Kindle Fire, in the future, probably after I get out of this deployment, but in all honesty, everything you wrote I can do with the Nook Color already (including all the previous Kindle features which is an app already). Except it does have an SD card slot, and comes with built in 5gig memory by itself (after the OS and updates). I'm not trying to push the Nook, just I did a lot of research on this before I deployed, and I personally found that the Nook Color, between utility, as a temp laptop, price, and the amount of pdf and other digital books I already have was by far the best option.
My wife has a newer Ipad, and I played with it a bit, not even worth it, in my opinion.
Society players know this issue best. We are the ones spending days at cons, three rounds on Saturday. That is why I asked in the Society messageboard.
I am trying to decide what to buy for reading paizo PDFs on the go.
Anyone care to advise/warn what devices do it well or poor?
I wanted to buy a cheap netbook on black friday but they are not carried/advertised much anymore in stores and I do not want to make an online purchase for this item. When I checked netbooks out last night. They were both weaker and more expensive than when i looked them over several months ago. Crazy, but that was the case. Maybe an effort by the store to make people want to spend even more for a laptop or tablet? I was leaning towards a netbook because of their long battery life. Something that could last me most if not the whole day at a con with three slots. I have no worry about them being weaker than a laptop. Laptops are way too short on battery life and more expensive. Now I am leaning towards the Ipad2 but it is damn expensive itself. At least it has a long battery life unlike a laptop. Thinking the 7 inch screen on a nook or kindle fire may be too small. I also do not know how well they can increase text size and/or zoom on a paizo pdf.
Thanks for any advice on any and all products people want to advise/warn on.
The Playbook has decent battery life (11hrs give or take depending on usage type), the ability to view PDFs and the 16G is $199.00 from now until Monday.
Have a look at it.
Can't afford an Ipad2, get a used Ipad1 on the cheap. There isn't a full device in existence that beats either for reading comfort or battery life. And the black/white Kindles won't cut it.
But then you are supporting the Cheliax of computer companies.
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I disagree with Sunderstone above.
I LOVE my Nookcolor, but of course I am not using a stock version of the OS, but rather have my rooted with CM7 OS, and use pdfreader as my prefered reader.
I typically get 8 hours on my nc, which is great for most games at a convention.
I do prefer to leave my nc tablet plugged in if I have an outlet available during my games (home games, and any convention that I can get an outlet).
goto XDA site here about rooting your NC XDA site
goto cyanogen site CM 7 site
Though with the great deals that are out there right now, I would suggest any of the tablets running Honeycomb (android 3.x) Acer and Asus are both selling for under $350 (and less) at this time, with ICE (android 4.x) on the horizon for next year.
The nookcolor is a great choice at this time due to it running for under $200 new and under $150 as a refurb unit.
Hope that helps.
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Has anyone had any experience with the Cruz T301?
A 7" android 2.2 color tablet 256 MB with SD slot (32 GB max). I'm specifically interested in page turning speed and zoom/scroll capabilities for Paizo PDFs.
I found it at Best Buy for $80.
Looks like there is a refurbished unit with 2 GB internal memory for the same price.
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I use an iPad, it lasts a long time and handles rule books in full color flawlessly. If the iPad2 is too pricey try looking for an iPad 1 on ebay or someplace like that. You may be able to get a good discount.
The money I've spent on my iPad is some of the best spent money of my life. It really is an amazing little machine. I use mine extensively for reading comics and books especially. And don't bother with iTunes - just throw your PDF's in your Dropbox folder, download them with your Dropbox app, and transfer them to Goodreader (a PDF-reader for iPad, which is really good and fast) - and you have your whole library with extremely easy access. And if this sounds like a lot of work, then I haven't conveyed it probably. It takes mere minutes and is an almost automatic process.
And I'm not an apple-fanboy, the iPad is just simply pure genius :)
I think an Asus Transformer with the keyboard dock has something like a 15-17 hour battery life. Pricey though.
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I use an iPad, it lasts a long time and handles rule books in full color flawlessly. If the iPad2 is too pricey try looking for an iPad 1 on ebay or someplace like that. You may be able to get a good discount.
This is absolutely right. Though if 10-12 hours of battery life is important, a NIB model will have better power.
For the commenter who mentioned that an Ipad needs iTunes to add pdfs to the reader -- No it doesn't and almost nobody uses it that way anymore. What you want to use is Goodreader (which is a much faster pdf app than Apple's anyway) along with Dropbox. Dropbox is a free cloud storage service and all files are you just drag and drop your files off your PC to Dropbox. You later transfer a file to the iPad wirelessly from Dropbox, either over 3G or Wifi, using Goodreader which is designed to support that cloud based file transfer system.
You can have Goodreader use a USB source instead of Dropbox if you buy the custom USB attachment for an iPad if you prefer (and I expect that's probably what you want to do if deployed).
I have an iPad 1 which I picked up of Craigslist this March which was almost essentially NIB and had seen almost no use. I have used it at Cons for 10 hour stretches with no problem. I would add that it is also easy to find a source of power at a con to plug in the iPad to recharge and that the recharge rate on a iPad is between 4:1 and 5:1. That means for every minute plugged in to a wall, that will give you 4 or 5 minutes of battery juice. That will mean even a long 3 session day at Gencon can be accomplished with topping up your power at lunch or whatever.
Like LazarX, I am not an Apple fanboy -- I'm a PC guy. But I love my iPad and consider it essential gaming gear now. It works extremely well and I am enthusiastic as hell over the money I pent on mine ($500). Great purchase. At $500 for my model? I ripped 'em off :)
Lastly, on storage size and .pdf: You don't need a 64 Gig model. If pdfs are all you are interested in using your iPad for -- get a 16 gig model or a 32 gig model. You will have PLENTY of space even with the smallest model.
Just to add to the Goodreader/iDevice accolades, I use the USB method to download my PDFs directly from my PC to my iPhone through iTunes. It's as simple as clicking the app, clicking the add file button, and pointing it to the PDFs.
You can also delete any file through the app itself without having to resync the device like you would in the free iBooks app. You can create any folder system on the device, annotate, create your own .txt files, etc.
The free iBooks app isn't bad if you don't want to pay the $5 or $6 bucks for Goodreader.
I disagree with Sunderstone above.
I LOVE my Nookcolor, but of course I am not using a stock version of the OS, but rather have my rooted with CM7 OS, and use pdfreader as my prefered reader.
I love my Nook Color too, but I'm having the same problem 'Stone has. Unless you're willing to do whatever Peddler did to yours, the NC is going to have some trouble with all the graphic elements Paizo piles on their pages.
For the most part, I love the way they make the artwork "selectable" so it can be removed and manipulated for handouts and such, but it confuses the heck out of my Nook. Often times the backgrounds will black out around pictures and can block a lot of text where it's text-wrapped around the image or, heaven help you, in a side bar.
It'll read single-image pdfs just fine (like all my old TSR pdfs), and I'm still looking for a way to "flatten" my Paizo books. As an added bonus, I'm sure a flattened version would turn pages quicker, too.
I use an ipad 1 and Goodreader for this and it works just fine. I hate itunes with a vengeance, but as my ipad and PC are both on the wireless network I just transfer files across using Goodreader's wireless connection. I'd use Dropbox, except I have to watch my monthly data cap.
The Playbook has decent battery life (11hrs give or take depending on usage type), the ability to view PDFs and the 16G is $199.00 from now until Monday.
I just wanted to throw out that I've got a little experience accumulated on this. I picked a PB up moments after the $300 price drop. It comes with Adobe Reader native. It's... the world's crappiest PDF reader. It's functionally identical to the Android version, which is therefore also very, very crappy.
That said, I've grabbed the developer's beta of OS 2.0 (due February) which includes an Android "player". It's not emulation; Android programs' Java is run natively, so there's no performance hit. From there, I've installed Repligo (for Android). I bought that while evaluating an Android device (Asus Transformer 101). It handles bookmarks, jumping to specific pages, links within PDFs, and is generally full-featured.
In that configuration, it's as fast as the Asus was, but only cost me $200 and some time to get running. I can justify that.
That all said, I don't consider either the current Tegra2 Android units or the PB to be truly fast enough for real use with Paizo's PDFs. At a calm table that's willing to wait a minute or two for a lookup, sure. It beats lugging a bunch of books with you. But it's nowhere near as fast as leafing through a physical book.
Looks like I may get the ipad2 64gb today. Apple has a black Friday sale and my GF wants to buy 2 of em for both of us. We are headed to best buy in a couple of min to chk their prices as well as the polyurethane smartcovers. The covers are apparently sold out in black from apple direct.
My GF is good to me :)
We ordered 2 iPad 64gb wifi (without the 3G) from apple's black friday sale today. I'm excited now. :)
I have a nook color with the ezpdf app (the stock pdf reader is trash) and it renders all the pdfs I've thrown at it. PF pdfs due to their image heavy nature do render somewhat slowly, but it always renders fully without any hitches. The ezpdf app also pre-caches the next page, rendering the next page instantly after some time (pre-cache loading taking the same as normal page rendering). This makes reading pdfs run very smoothly, but if you intend to "flip through" the book, its going to struggle (bookmarks are your friends in this case).
I imagine the nook tablet and the kindle fire both with dual core processors, unlike the nook color would perform much better. I frequently use my nook color at the table. Having the Jade Regent AP book and the pdf on my nook is very handy to have.
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Like several of the above posters, I use an iPad2 with the Goodreader app. If you can afford it, I have no probable making the recommendation.
Some thoughts:
Pros:
--With wifi on and bluetooth off I get about 10 hours of battery life.
--It only took a little bit to learn how to use GoodReader.
--You can switch from book to book in seconds. Unclosed recent pdfs appear at the top, and you can switch between pages often in less than a second, 2 seconds if some rendering required.
--Most Paizo pdfs are indexed enough that GoodReader can take you directly to what you want. (Say your reading a module, and want to check what a spell does, I can usually pull it in less than 15 seconds, a lot quicker then pulling the CR off my shelf.)
--The iPad has lots and lots of uses beyond pdf reading.
--The text in most Paizo pdfs is fine for reading. Very rarely I will zoom in to read. Double page texts are too small to read without zooming, however.
--Term searches in pdfs on the iPad2 are reasonably fast.
--Much nicer (easier, quieter, book-like) to hold and read than any netbook.
Con:
--The iPad costs a lot. GoodReader itself was negligable (Less than $5). Of course, I justify buying pdfs by telling myself I need earn the price of the iPad back.
-- Add $30+ for a good case which covers the front and back. The Apple smart cases are overpriced and don't protect the back.
--You can only look at one page (or two page spread) at a time. You can switch between pages in less then two seconds, but your only looking at one page at a time.
--Itunes is bloatware, and not very intuitive.
--Some people don't like to look at backlit screens, especially before going to bed.
Additional thought:
-- When I bought my iPad2 there wasn't any real competition (yes, I spent some time playing with the Xoom). By the end of 2012, the Android tablets will be viable competitors if they are not already, and MS will have come out with its first Windows 8 tablets.
Yes, agreed, the best method of getting books onto the ipad is using goodreader to download directly from Paizo and then unzip them. It's a little bit fiddly, because of the way goodreader interacts with the personalizer links, you need to click links a few different ways to get it to work, but once it works, it's great. I've been no where near my home computer for 2 or 3 days at a time and still managed to get my APs downloaded to read as soon as they've been posted.
For cases, I personally recommend the Octavo from Pen and Quill. It's a bit heavy, but it's extremely solid.
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If you could bring yourself to make the buy online, netbooks that can handle PDFs are pretty cheap these days (in my experience, any netbook with the Atom processor can do it with no issue) and a spare high-capacity battery could turn a $200 netbook into something with enough juice to compete with the tablets.
I GM my home game using my Dell Mini 9. I haven't put the battery to the test yet, but as far as power goes, netbooks can do it.
My other reading device is an iTouch with the Goodreader App. My used iTouch with the wifi turned off can read PDFs for 7 or 8 hours of continuous use, I'm pretty sure a brand new one, or one with the battery recently replaced, can do even better.
...though I must admit, I've been seriously considering the EEE Pad transformer.
I love Asus. I looked at the Tablets too but the battery life turned me off. Same with the Toshiba Thrive 32gb ($479). battery life is a major concern for me. There are times when I'm out all day on the job and the other tablets won't last as long as the iPad.
Netbooks are a great lower priced alternative, I bought one for my GF this past year (ASus 1005 or some such). Even with windows 7 starter, it's a hair slow because if the 1gb ram. I find it odd that many of the newer net books have a full version of windows 7 yet still come with 1gb ram. Definately get 2gb if you go the net book route.
This is more of a tech discussion than a Pathfinder RPG discussion, so I've moved this thread to the Technology forum.
Thread Necromancy!
Did you make a choice Raymond?
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I have an update on the Cruz T301 7" Android tablet.
No bluetooth, no camera, no GPS, but
WiFi, Music, SD slot, mini USB, capacitance screen
And it handles Paizo PDFs quite well after you get used to the Android touch interface.
You need to buy ($4.99) the Repligo Reader for Android to get a PDF reader that is fast enough to use at the table, but it works great. There is a small delay when opening a file, but once it is loaded into memory, turning pages is nearly instantaneous.
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First of all, THANK YOU EVERYONE for sharing all of your knowledge and experience with us.
I don't know how but it appears I made two threads of this, didn't realize it till now. Or maybe it had something to do with the board move. I wish I saw this version back when it was more important and time sensitive. With the other thread in the Pathfinder Society board, i got a less feedback But what i did get i found helpful. I picked up the iPad2 at best buy for about $455 black Friday priced plus tax for the 16 gig with only wifi. $10 for a cheap cover that I felt I was willing to eat the cost of till I find out more about what covers we're worth the big money. $30 bucks for the transparent sticker to protect the screen from a scratch. No cost on black Friday to have one of their "experts" put on the sticker. They did a good enough job as in no air bubbles like when I did my touch screen phone and PSP but there are 2 specks of dirt betweeno the screen and sticker so I was a little disappointed by that.
I have mixed feelings about the purchase. I GMed 1 table so far with it and it did pretty well but various aspects I'll write more about later have me still wondering if it was the right move. A few quickeis before I leave, some of these may be fixed if in look through the user guide more but for now they bug me.
Cannot highlight PDF, good for skill/save DCs in adventures, wrote a bunch of notes on loose leaf instead.
Trouble figuring out how to copy text, more tha a single word or just a single sentence out of a paragraph.
Even after lowering the volume, I still hear every typed letter.
No automatic word processor. The notepad is not sufficient. If I buy the apple app Pages, can people on a PC read that if I email it to them?
Not finding many open/free wifi spots, think I should have considered going 3G.
Having trouble placing the cursor where I want, like in the middle of a word to edit.
Over all, I wanted to make a purchase On Black Friday to save some money buy I don't think the fire or nook were for sale since they were brand new. Being brand new gave me little time to research those options. I feel anyone wanting to make this electronic device step should ask all their friends and family who has what and ask if they can use their device kfor a day and see how the paizo PDF handles. Something I could not do in store. I want to make a you tube video showing how well various devices work to help others with this choice in the future. Anyone want to help?
Before I leave, I want to add, if whatever device you currently have does a decent or even good job. Don't buy another device just because it is a tiny bit better. At least untill your old device breaks down, you need a new device for the other things you can do or unless you can just afford to just throw away money(because you already have several months worth of emergency saving to pay all your bills in case you loose your job or have an expensive problem develop)Value what you have and only buy what you can afford. No need to run up a credit card debt.
Most PDF readers for tablets don't have the ability to highlight passages from the PDF, most will let you book mark and/or copy the passage to a note pad for quick reference however.
I'm not sure you can do this on an iPad because it doesn’t have true multitasking but get 2 or 3 PDF readers that way you can open a different PDF on each reader and then switch between the readers for quicker referencing.
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As a fellow PDFer and fan of tablets, I just wanted to let everyone know that the new Asus Transformer Prime is a phenomenal piece of hardware, though as it's priced to match the iPad 2(even though it's got better hardware specs than the iPad 2) it's well worth it. I tried going the cheap tablet route last year with a refurb gTablet and while it was instructive and fun, all it made me do was want to eventually get a modern tablet.
I've tried the netbook route (an Asus Eee PC from about three years ago) and it's great in its own limited way, especially with a 2 GB upgrade and running Windows 7, but it's hard to justify a netbook these days with tablets getting more and more affordable and full featured laptops getting so cheap.
Most PDF readers for tablets don't have the ability to highlight passages from the PDF, most will let you book mark and/or copy the passage to a note pad for quick reference however.
I'm not sure you can do this on an iPad because it doesn’t have true multitasking but get 2 or 3 PDF readers that way you can open a different PDF on each reader and then switch between the readers for quicker referencing.
ezPDF Reader supports highlights, underlining, and annotations. You can even draw boxes, circles, arrows, etc. on the screen. It's a marvelous app. Of course, I'm on Android (got Ice Cream Sandwich running on my Adam this week...very nice!), so I'm not sure there's an iPad equivalent. But, if you're on Android, you want to pay for this app.
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Found a way to silence the keyboard sounds.
Will check if my phone can do that modem or hotspot thing, big thank you on that. Picked up several free PDF readers but have not compared them to iBooks for features like highlighting, will do so.
Thanks again all for all the shared insight and wisdom.
Raymond
I hate to jump on a mostly dead horse but I'ma back Mok.
Get... ... now. Even linking it.
It is the must have App if you want to do anything half-way serious. Not only is a darn good PDF reader but has many additional uses. This goes out to anyone getting an iOS device (or who has not gotten GoodReader), get it. You will not regret the price.
For me the biggest use is that of an "Open In..." hub. Almost any app that can "Open In..." it's files can basically export to GoodReader and then into other Apps. Add to that it's WebDAV mode, which allows you to connect to it wirelessly from you PC OR any other device with a web browser. Example use would be digital handouts players can retrieve from you device.
There are many options for portable 3G/4G hotspot boxes and a number of portable HDD/SSD enclosures that are also mini-WiFi routers. The Seagate Go-Flex comes to mind as it was featured at MacWorld. Apple should really just give up and let iOS devices run their own Ad hoc networks.
Another iPad usage tip you may like. Go into settings and change the "mute" switch to a rotation lock. I lock rotation more often then I mute so it's quite handy. Also the root level gestures, 5-finger pinch to the Home screen and 4-finger slide up for the quick switch tray are very good.
Answer to the Pages question. Pages can export a Word or PDF file. If MS Office reliable formatting compatibility is an issue you may want to go read though the collected material over at ipadwordprocessor.com. Also the zdnet round up for 2011 is still handy.
I have Documents 2 Go Premium, it's an okay a viewer but not a great editor compared to Pages. I picked up Office2 HD after their latest update and I spotted the "open in..." feature in their demo reel. Office2 HD is not the most robust in terms of file support (doesn't take 2007 pptx or xlsx), but is decent basic document editor. Hopefully they'll get that 2007 support soon. Users have already noted some issues with loosing formatting in docx (including hyperlinks), and I've noticed it's missing things like support for iOS 5s dictionary and the spell check is kinda weak. Here is the latest MacWorld review. As a lowest cost bottom of the stack option it isn't all bad, and if Byte2 is serious about trying to take on Apple's iWorks on iPad as a content creation tool it may see more improvement. At the very least it doesn't dead end your work flow on the iPad the way Pages can. Pages can upload to a WebDAV on the same network (nudge nudge, someone else's GoodReader), Office2 HD runs it's own WebDAV like GoodReader.
QuickOffice doesn't have "Open In...", at least as far as I know, but it does support all the 2007 file types. It doesn't have nearly the same editing abilities that Office2 HD or Pages has for new document creation. It's mostly geared toward small edits to existing files, not ground up creation.
If you are looking for a vector drawing App I strongly suggest TouchDraw. While it doesn't have as clean an interface as iDraw it's a heck of lot more powerful. Plus as I prefer to see in Apps, it can get its files back out to other Apps many different ways. Including its own TouchDraw format so you can send that on to GoodReader and hence to other iPads on the same network. If you can't tell I'm big on local network interoperability between devices. What's the point of having these shiny new "post-pc" computers if they can't even pass files back and forth on a local network?