late adopter

I am the beneficiary of the Systems Administrator's largesse, in the form of a second hand tablet. It is an Asus, and beyond that I can't tell you, but I am someone who did not discover until my early twenties that there was more than one sort of BMW.  The SA upgraded to a bigger and faster version that was better for running video, and with my birthday approaching was beginning to think of a tablet as a suitable present, before having to admit that it made more sense to try me on an existing one before investing in another, just so that I could open a new box.  Since the SA would do all the setting up, it would have made it an expensive box-opening experience, and anyway I am all for recycling and re-using.

The SA scrubbed all the old SA things off the tablet until it was returned to factory condition, then could not believe that I did not know my Google password.  I couldn't remember ever having had such a thing, but the SA assured me that I must have when I got my new phone.  How long ago was that?  March of last year, I said.  And when did I last buy an App?  April of last year, I hazarded. After some searching through the papers in my filing tray, which made me think I must do some filing, I found the sheet where I'd written down my Google password, but it didn't work, and the SA, after asking sadly whether that Z could possibly be a 2, had to do a password recovery exercise and reset it.

I must be about the last educated to degree level fifty something in England to have not had a tablet.  I've noticed over the past couple of years that my friends' emails have started arriving with little tags at the end, sent from my iPad, or whatever it is.  Actually, I think my new phone does something similar, but it is tactful enough to just put Sent from my Android Device, not Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Ace 2- too-mean-to-buy-an-S4-but-at-least-no-mugger-would-want-it-budget-phone.

I ought to be writing this post on the Asus.  I thought about it, but time's getting on, I've got other things to do afterwards, and I am a reasonably quick touch typist as long as it's text and not figures, while the Asus touch screen was very sensitive when I tried it out and I might take some time to get up to speed.  Then after that I suppose it will do all the things that tablets do.  It has synchronised itself to my Kindle, although it rather idiosyncratically orders the contents alphabetically by title, and I don't recognise most of the virtual dust jackets, which didn't come with the original Kindle version.  I have yet to discover how reliable it is at picking up emails, whereas I know the answer with the phone, which is Not very, sometimes it is faster than the laptop but Sync is out of order quite often.  And then I need to work out when I'm going to use it, given that with the laptop, the Kindle and the phone I wasn't aware of any outstanding needs to be met.  But that is the art of twenty-first century consumer electronics, to fill needs we didn't know we had.

When asked what I wanted for my birthday, I suggested a waffle maker, some more glass danglers for the garden, or some rusted iron plant supports.  It's just as well that the pace of development in home electronics isn't down to me, or we'd all still be on the original Nokia.