[Mon Jun 17 15:10:45 CDT 2013]

Well, I spent last week in Colorado, where I was visiting my sister's family and my parents, who traveled from Spain to stay in the USA for a couple of months. Now that I'm back, I find myself with one more device: an iPad Mini my parents and sister gave me as a present. Among other things, it will make it easier to chat with them via FaceTime now that we are living so many miles apart from each other once again. To tell the truth, I'm more of an Android and open source fan, but it just doesn't make sense to look a gift horse in the mouth. I already ran into a couple of issues (e.g., some applications that I am familiar with are not written for the iOS, it seems, and a couple of websites I regularly visit show videos using Adobe Flash, which does not work on Apple products) but, overall, as with anything made by Apple, it's an excellent product.

So, why do I mention all this? Basically because I was already considering to purchase a tablet (I was leaning towards the Samsung Gallaxy Tab) to do most of my reading, as well as movie and documentary viewing. Although, as I've written elsewhere, I still much prefer the traditional paper books, the fact is that they waste a lot of space. That may not matter much if one stays put, but I continue moving from place to place (sometimes, even from country to country), so I end up being unable to carry my large personal library with me. That being the case, it would make sense to do most of my reading on an e-book reader and limit my purchase of traditional books to just a few. And, once made the decision to try and read more in digital format, it just makes more sense, I think, to do so on a tablet, rather than a pure e-book reader. After all, tablets are far more versatile and allow me to do plenty of other things. Yes, the reading may be a bit more cumbersome, but its versatility is a major gain to me. I suppose the next step is to see if I can connect the iPad Mini to a projector, so I can watch movies with the kids on the wall in my living room. We'll see. {link to this entry}