MINDSHIFT time:  it’s NOT a phone

An obvious one this one but took me a while to grasp a quite a subtle shift for the Android phone user. The Android tablet is not a phone and you don’t have to use it like a phone, let me explain…..

I've had an android phone for around a year, an HTC Desire and I love it. It has taken over from my itouch as my media player of choice , I synch podcasts each week and play them through my radio on the way to work, it  handles social networks , calendars and emails, it even takes photos of technology equipment reviews in WHSmiths so I can avoid buying magazines! (cheap)

Because screen size is so small, phone users rely on apps to deliver content and perform processes; Apps are dedicated to a single use and are configured to the small screen size. To use the browsers on the Desire is doable but a pain in the backside, text visibility is difficult without Panning and scanning across the website.  Apps are great, but apps are only as great as the developer and there are quite a few p*ss poor apps about.

When I got my Asus Transformer I initially treated it like a phone I downloaded a shed full of apps and my home screens look like I've thrown a handful of apps across the room and they have installed where they have stuck.

The Android Marketplace has only a limited number of apps which are optimised for the large screen size (although most work in some form or another) The number of Honeycomb apps are increasing all the time but why rely on apps anymore? We now have a lovely big screen that the browser can now be used alongside of apps.While apps are being scaled up to match the honeycomb screen resolution, the HTML world is scaled up and ready be used  ... For example  if you are looking for a news aggregator there are many sites that can do this www.news now.co.uk is one such site.

A big positive for the ASUS Transformer and Android tablets in general is the support for Flash, most websites just work.

All this may seem obvious to some but a little MINDSHIFT opens the potential of the tablet.

A thumbs up for the Transformer