charged

I'm on a train in England. My bags are packed for home. My gadgets are charged. I have been fed. Reograph time.

At home, a charged gadget is a content and happy gadget. On a travel day, a charged gadget is a gadget that has taken up a defensive position. I picture some as soldiers, pacing in trenches near the front lines. I picture others recycling tires and rationing meat on the home front. Maybe the rest are like children. We try to shelter them but they see more than we realize. Camera? Home front. iPhone? Trench. Nexus tablet? Child.

I can't spare the phone for reography this morning. I need it for train updates and electronic boarding passes and even a phone call if everything else goes wrong. I can't use the camera for reography. This tablet doesn't really have a role in my day to day life. I didn't even realize it was in my bag until last night.

I bought the tablet to play with HTML5 media APIs in Chrome and Firefox. I leave it stock and use only those apps. I load nothing else and I use no personal accounts. On this trip, the tablet is essentially disconnected. My phone's hotspot feature disappeared when I bought the wrong local SIM.

Reographing this morning meant finding a text editor on the tablet and working offline. I have little experience with Android. I expected disappointment. I thought I would have to write this article in the 'notes' area of a calendar. What I found is Quickoffice. It is a disappointment of a different kind.

Quickoffice appears capable enough for me to use it to write a book about how bad it is. I do see how awkward and ungrateful my criticism may appear.

I knew I wasn't going to like it from the word go. Actually, I didn't like it from the phrase 'Not yet saved'. Just flashing back to saving work is its own trauma. It feels as archaic as ducking and covering, as judgmental as a commandment. Lost work becomes a righteous punishment for the wicked and immoral.

In the plus column, Quickoffice does rotate from portrait to landscape. Moses' tablets didn't. In the minus column, the landscape interface is apalling. The keyboard takes up a lot of space. Fine. 

Quickoffice trashes an astonishing fraction of the balance with a pointless and unwelcome interface ribbon. Above my editing slit now is a giant blue 'W' to remind me that I'm editing a document and not a spreadsheet. The name of the document is up there. It probably takes up as much space as the letter 'Q' on the keyboard and isn't quite as useful. Below the name are 25 characters telling me that my document is not saved. Next comes an enormous swath of empty space. Then a picture of a 3.5" floppy diskette. I'm old enough to read that rune but I don't know who else is. Then come mystery buttons. Those runes elude me. I suspect at least one to be a booby trap.

quick office use of space in landscape on a Nexus 7
Photo courtesy your correspondent

In England, I visited The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. They had one of just about every interesting computing gadget. I saw several nearly forgotten friends on their shelves hidden among a hundred other gems I never knew.

I never had a Tandy 100 portable. I didn't see one on the museum shelves but I saw a number of similarly elegant portables from the era. I have nothing but respect for the nexus tablet hardware, but I wonder if it would be put to a better use emulating the model 100 than running Quickoffice. The nexus tablet is simply not ready for battle as it comes out of the box.

It is always difficult for me to do any computing in England without thinking of the hardware of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That machine functioned not only as imagined Wikipedia but also as Ford Prefect's reporter's notebook for 15 disconnected years on Earth. Even today, the model 100 might be more fit for that purpose than a stock tablet.