Love a bit of alliteration! I have had in my possession for the last week or so a Telstra T-Touch Tab. It has taken me a little to warm to it. You know that feeling you have when you change mobile phones and you don’t know how everything works? You keep thinking it was so much quicker/better/easier on the old one. But then you spend time working with the new gadget and you start to get it. You work out what makes it tick, how it will work for you and it becomes your friend!
The Touch Tab and I are still acquainting ourselves. It is not as intuitive as what I have been used to, but it is certainly not difficult to operate. My 11 year old helped me out so I could do some things I when I got stuck! The easiest way to describe it is as a very big smart phone. At first I just couldn’t get how to make it work properly. I was used to my iPhone and just the light pressure to make stuff happen. Then I found the stylus (fancy name for a pointing sticky thing) and it all became so much easier. The stylus has a little hidey hole on the back of the tablet. If you are interested in the techno reason as to why the touch mechanism of this tablet is different to the iPhone/iPod, Yvonne at ideasculture has a very good explanation. In short it is to do with the Touch Tab being ‘resistive’ and the iPhone is ‘capacitive’.
Telstra T-Touch Tab and Recipes
My favourite use to date has to be this:
The Touch Tab has this great little stand attached to it, so it sits up beautifully on the kitchen bench. My recipe book is my blog, so to be able to have easy access to my recipes and other online recipes on a decent size screen is excellent.
Telstra T-Touch Tab and Gmail
I am a massive Gmail fan and also use Gmail Tasks and Google Calendar. While I still have a written to do list, these three applications are my central planning tools. I try my best not to get on the Macbook when the kids are about, but there are times when I need to quickly respond to a task or try to get my head around where I am up to.
The Touch Tab makes this much easier for me to get online quickly without alerting the kids! The bigger screen compared to the iPhone makes is easier to type longer emails and check my calendar and tasks. It does have a type of predictive text that takes some getting used to. I was writing away only to re-read my email and see all these strange words in my text. As you type a line of commonly used words appears on the bottom of the screen. You need to select which of the words that you want to insert to the text. Once I worked this out it was much quicker, I just need to remember it is there.
I took the Touch Tab out with me when I went to The Magic Of Growth installation, to a kids activity and then today to the completely gorgeous Teatime and Tales. When I took it to the kid’s activity, while they were doing their thing, I sat and started writing a blog post and answering emails. I would have finished more work, except I kept stopping to answer queries about what I was using! While I like the Touch Tab for email and general online stuff, I found it too hard to use the stylus to type out a post in its entirety. I ended up dot pointing the key ideas that I wanted to talk about and leave the details for later.
Telstra T-Touch Tab and Photos at “Teatime and Tales”
We arrived earlier at Teatime and Tales than the gorgeous birthday girl that we were meeting for morning tea. With the kids having a ball exploring the lovely environment of the cafe, I responded to some emails and downloaded an app called Retro Camera (free). The Touch Tab has both a camera and video camera installed (2 megapixel camera with video recording). The photos that it takes are okay as you can see here below.
But as it is powered by Android, you have the capability to download over 80,000s apps for it, like Retro Camera. Check out these lovely pics that I took using this app – this one below is the inside of Teatime and Tales. This cafe is located at 412 Rathdowne St, Carlton and is the most divine place I have been to since Madame Brussels. Minus the alcohol of course, although they did tell us their liquor license is being processed!
And this one of the outside area were we sat in the delightful spring sunshine for two hours:
Telstra T-Touch Tab and Android Apps
I have been getting the kids to test out some games for Android that we can run on the Touch Tab which I will review separately. I am after recommendations though, for productivity or organsiationl type apps, so would love it if you could leave any suggestions in the comments. With the size of the screen and its portability, I am excited about the potential of the Touch Tab to help me keep organised at home.
Other Things To Know About The Telstra T-Touch Tab
Some more specific info on the Telstra T-Touch Tab:
- Price: At $299 it is less than half the price of the iPad. Great entry price for families wanting to try the new tablet technology.
- Size: 209 x 108 x 15.5mm
- Phone features: Voice capable, SMS/MMS capable.
- Battery life: It says up to 150 minutes talk time or video playback time and standby time up to 140 hours. I used it considerably when I was out from 9am until 1pm and it still has a little bit of battery life left in it, but I don’t think it would have lasted for a whole day outing.
- Entertainment: MP3 player and video player handling MPEG4
- Memory: 512MB internal memory with 2GB micro-SD card expandable up to 16GB.
- Navigation: GPS built in. I haven’t tried this functionality yet and as I get lost very frequently, I am looking forward to seeing how it can help me.
Just for the record, I have been given a Telstra T-Touch Tab by Telstra free of charge to review. The comments expressed by me reflect my user experience and personal opinion.
And thanks to Jolie at Hey Bambini for her recommendation of Teatime and Tales.