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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  One tablet is enough
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One tablet is enough

How to substitute a tablet for your laptop on your journeys

A tablet, keyboard, FileHub and one or two cables make for a lighter package than most ultra-light laptops. Photo: iStockphotoPremium
A tablet, keyboard, FileHub and one or two cables make for a lighter package than most ultra-light laptops. Photo: iStockphoto

NEW DELHI :

This writer recently went to Japan for a week-long visit of a number of Japanese watchmaking facilities and workshops. Details of these visits and my key learnings will appear in pieces elsewhere in this newspaper in the coming weeks and months. I also spent a day or two trooping around Tokyo, eating the excellent food and purchasing some excellent Japanese electronics. And, most of all, taking several notes on the Japanese approach to untangling aspects of personal and professional life. Much material has been accumulated for future editions of this column.

My schedule was very hectic indeed. But I still managed to keep on top of my work emails, some writing commitments and some pending reading. And I managed to do this all despite deciding to not carry a laptop.

This experience has everything to do with the promised theme of this edition of the Untangler: how to substitute a tablet for your laptop on your journeys. This is much, much easier than it may sound to even the most seasoned business traveller. And I will try to share the hardware and software I use on my journeys with a first-edition iPad mini.

Now the first and biggest hurdle to eschewing a bulky laptop is in the mind. For years and years I routinely travelled with both iPad and laptop… because I was paranoid. I was paranoid that some work emergency would come up that would require the computing power of nothing less than a full-fledged desktop operating system. But after many years of lugging around sacks full of cables and adaptors and devices, I’ve finally developed the courage to leave my laptop when I leave on most journeys.

Instead, I take with me a perfectly tuned combination of hardware and software, the iPad mini being central to this. First of all, there is the matter of a keyboard. I simply cannot use the iPad onscreen keyboard for anything longer than a tweet. So nowadays, I carry the Logitech Keys-To-Go Bluetooth keyboard. The peripheral ticks all the boxes: It is light, has excellent battery life, is hardy and resistant to most spills, and is easy to type on once you get used to it. That last bit is really the hurdle for most people. Transitioning to a portable Bluetooth keyboard can sometimes take a little persistence. Alternatively you could go for a more traditional clickety-click style keyboard. Amazon’s AmazonBasics Bluetooth keyboard is pretty good.

Choose whatever you like as long as it is light, has a long battery life that lasts for at least a week or more, and isn’t too fiddly to use.

One additional piece of hardware that may come in handy is a card-reader-cum-Wi-Fi-hub-cum-battery-pack. The model I use is the RAVPower FileHub WD01. This takes care of that common fear: “What if I only have a tablet and I have to access a pen drive or an SD card?"

With the FileHub, you can plug in a card or pen drive, and then access it from your tablet over Wi-Fi. The FileHub can also be used to top up the batteries on your phone, tablet and keyboard in an emergency.

Then there is the matter of software. I use an iPad mini and do almost all my writing in two apps: Drafts and Ulysses. Drafts is a catch-call container for anything you want to write, from tweets to notes to entire articles. You can then fire them off as emails or status updates or export them to other apps. And it works very well with keyboards. Tweak it a little, and write a few macros, and you can really turbocharge your experience.

Ulysses is really a luxury. But I use it for all column writing and journalistic projects. Mainly because it syncs well with the version of Ulysses I have on my laptop and desktop. I can start a piece anywhere and finish it anywhere else. So I tend to sequester such writings in an exclusive app.

What has really improved the iPad experience of late are new iOS updates that bake keyboard short cuts into apps. Making it much more rewarding to use a Bluetooth keyboard. The situation is no different with Android tablets. The latest Microsoft tablets, meanwhile, are designed as mobile computers.

Pack all this into a bag—tablet, keyboard, FileHub and one or two cables—and you should be carrying a package substantially lighter than most ultra-light laptops. With devices that all boast of superior battery life. All week in Japan, I had to charge my iPad once and my keyboard not at all.

Once you get the hang of travelling with a tablet, and learning to trust it as a primary computing device, the ensuing “untangling" is remarkable. Just make sure you power through the initial phase of niggles and squeaks and apprehensions.

The next column will be a compendium of untangling lessons from Japan.

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Published: 21 Dec 2015, 07:39 PM IST
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