Good tablet for reading PDF, Google Docs, and, sometimes, Word files stored in dropbox.com?

by philg

Folks:

For my software engineering consulting work I have a lot of documents that I sometimes need to review. Rather than be stuck at my desk in front of my monitor (a fairly nice 30″ LCD, but suffers from the usual lack of sharpness of any color screen) I would prefer to be able to lounge on the living room sofa or walk around or whatever. So I’d like to find a table that, given WiFi access, facilitates browsing files (Google Docs, Word, PDF) stored in Google Docs and in Dropbox.com and then downloading a file for temporary viewing. I’d like it to have a black and white eInk screen but could relax this to a less sharp LCD if there truly aren’t any eInk readers that can do the job. I can also relax the requirement to view Microsoft Word documents (I never originate documents in Microsoft Office but end up receiving a fair number of files in this format).

I don’t want to have to decide in advance which documents to view. I.e., it wouldn’t be practical to use the original Kindle because I don’t want to email stuff to myself all the time.

One obvious idea seems to be the latest Barnes and Noble Nook. It has an eInk screen and runs Android (I think). For $139 it has just 2 GB of memory, but that’s fine since I don’t need the documents to be persistent on the device. The Barnes and Noble site, however, doesn’t advertise the possibility of installing apps on the device. So I am worried that there wouldn’t be any way to install the Dropbox app. It also looks as though there isn’t support for Microsoft Office formats.

Another idea would be to abandon the tablet idea and use a Acer AC700-1099 Chromebook, despite the fact that I don’t need the keyboard. The color LCD screen won’t be sharp like eInk, but the higher resolution (1366×768) might make up for it. I am somewhat confused as to how well the Chromebook would work with Dropbox (maybe you’d just browse the Dropbox Web site and download one file at a time; no need to install an app) and Word docs.

Thanks in advance for suggestions.

25 thoughts on “Good tablet for reading PDF, Google Docs, and, sometimes, Word files stored in dropbox.com?”

  1. The Nook Touch is inexpensive, has a great screen for reading and is easy to root. After rooting, you can install Android Market apps and you’re good to go.

    See here:

    http://is.gd/gCtbfW

  3. Reading technical documents is one of the reasons I bought the iPad. The GoodReader app does a pretty good job of handling PDFs, though I find I have to zoom in on most PDFs to make them usable- or view them in landscape mode. The iPad also does some MS Doc format viewing natively, I think, but there are third party apps that do a better job.

    There may be Android tablets that can do a decent job at this; I’ve never used one. I would be wary of using something smaller than a 10″ screen, because my middle-aged eyes need that size.

    I have a first gen iPad that does the job perfectly well, so a wi-fi only first gen iPad would probably even be fairly cheap.

    I’m dubious about the Chromebooks, if only because you’re stuck with whatever can be done via HTML.

  4. Well… I’d say an iPad 2, but you usually aren’t too receptive to products out of Cupertino. But it definitely will do what you want less the eink screen.

    The dropbox client is really great, and I constantly use it for what appears to be a very similar task to yours. I will often have PDFs or slides that I want to read throughout the day, and so before I head out the door, I just drag to dropbox, knowing that I’ll be able to pick them up when I reach my destination. It also lets me “star” documents in my dropbox folder on the iPad, which dropbox then saves right on the iPad, so if I’m in an area without wifi, I can still pull up the document.

    The Safari browser also will let you edit and view google doc documents and spreadsheets.

    Also, as for the Chromebook, it looks like you’ve confused the camera resolution (1280×1024) with the screen resolution (1366 x 768). The PPI in the Chromebook is 135.09 PPI (at 11.6″ diag.) while the iPad is 131.96 PPI (at 9.7″ diag.)†

    † DPI Calculator: http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html

  5. I have read hundreds (okay, maybe thousands now) of pages on an original iPad. I am pretty sure you could get a 16g WiFi model for $350 refurbished. No need to worry about any of the Apple stuff, just use GoodReader and Dropbox and you’re done.

    You can work harder not to be part of the borg, but that’s wasted effort.

  6. Have you looked at the Sony eReader. Features say you can do most of what you want except for apps installation. BTW I believe Dropbox is only available on the standard Mac/Android/Blackberry platforms for mobile devices.

  7. Colin: I would be happy to use an iPad or Android tablet for this application but for the fuzzy color screen. The documents are nearly all black and white and when I’ve looked at an iPad (color LCD) side-by-side with a big Kindle (eInk), the iPad looked broken.

  8. I find the PDF reader on the Kindle 2 to be pretty lousy, though being able to shift them over to the device via USB cable is nice. It can’t reflow the text like it can for proper e-book formats, so there’s a lot of zooming and shifting around and stuff. If your PDFs are text-based rather than scans, then you might have good luck using Calibre to move them over to an ebook format that the Kindle supports. Otherwise, if you can stand the text, I agree with the suggestions for the IPad2+DropBox+some PDF reader or other (there are several, one that even supports annotations, though I don’t have mine handy to look).

  9. Well, the iBooks app on the iPad works pretty well with PDFs. I read my books as ePub, but i have used the PDF function with older books and recipes. I also use Dropbox a lot since I discovered it’s the most straightforward way to transfer ebooks, photos and other documents from my Mac mini libraries to the iPads (I’m using iPad 2, hubby is using the original iPad) and other devices without physically connecting with cables.

    P.S. I don’t understand the comment about the fuzzy color screen. The iPad screen is fuzzy?

  10. Anna: The iPad screen, like any current color LCD screen, is fuzzy. What you see is the backlight filtered through three layers that block portions of the color spectrum. The trip through these three layers renders the text very unsharp compared to the eInk display on a Kindle. The iPad is no better or worse than my 30″ LCD desktop monitor, but the resolution and size are much smaller so I can’t compensate by bumping up the font size. My friend who is really serious about on-screen reading bought a $7000 monochrome LCD display (normally used by radiologists looking at medical images) for looking at PDFs of journal papers. He says that it is infinitely easier than reading text on the adjacent standard color LCD monitor.

  11. I am curious about what Amazon will be bringing out in the short term (3-4 months). They interviewed me about 3 months ago about new Kindle targeted to businesses, and they wouldn’t give any details, but said use your imagination. Which was fine, but I imagined a much larger, 10″++ tablet able to display relatively full sized documents. But I have literally no details on anything.

    However, Amazon is said to be coming out with an iPad targeted tablet.

    Now maybe you wait 3-4 months and it’s a wonderful iPad killer, but still a lousy e-reader. Who knows.

    FWIW, I dislike the current Kindle sizes, and do like reading Kindle material on tablets, but these are tablets with larger displays that give me more of a book feeling than a peephole into a book feeling. But I respect that the Kindle e-ink displays are much better for reading. I would buy a large format Kindle. But not a small format one.

  12. There is a rumor of a Retina display iPad coming out in about two months. That would be 2x the current resolution (4x the pixels) of the current models.

    Whenever it’s released, the Android products will follow in a few or six months, depending on Apple’s exclusivity agreements.

    GoodReader on iPad works well enough for me for a similar application, but I wouldn’t object to more pixels.

  13. If you can endure your desktop a while longer, wait and see if iPad 3 has a retina screen (i.e. 326 ppi). That will resolve any sharpness or detail complaints you might have.

  14. The Notion Ink Adam is an Android 2.x (not Android 3.x, i.e. “Honeycomb” used on the Motorola Xoom, etc) tablet with a dual-mode e-ink/LCD screen. The screen is from PixelQi, an MIT startup (well, MIT-related anyway; the founder and the same technology are used in the One Laptop Per Child laptop).

    Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get one, and the units suffer from many QA problems.

  15. It’s not eInk by any stretch of the imagination but some of the newer Android devices have IPS LCDs at WXGA resolution. A friend bought the ASUS Transformer and finds it much nicer to read on then his iPad 1.

  16. Philip:

    Since you mentioned a Chromebook might do, something else you might consider, if you can find one locally, is: an Acer netbook w/11.6″ screen (1366 x 768), w/2GB RAM and a 250GB (some report getting 320GB) hard drive, w/dual core AMD processor for $250 + $50 gift card from Target this week (in-store only). It weighs 3 pounds, has a dual-core processor, HDMI, a useable keyboard (almost full-sized) and full Windows 7.

    Details on the model:
    http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/LU.SFT02.002

    Processor info:
    http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-C-50-Notebook-Processor.40960.0.html

    Target inventory checker (pre-set to the product, just put in your zip):
    http://sites.target.com/site/en/spot/mobile_fiats.jsp?dpci=080-11-0305

  17. Folks: A lot of great input. Thanks. It sounds as though what would be ideal is an Android or iPad tablet with a 12″ eInk touchscreen. Sadly, nobody makes it!

    David: Thanks for the reminder about netbooks. They’re all at least twice as heavy as a tablet computer, aren’t they? And there is no way that they are going to start up as fast as a Chromebook, I wouldn’t think, given that the Chromebook uses a solid state disk. On the other hand, the netbook has a big enough hard drive to sync with Dropbox, so it would work on airplane flights, etc.

  19. Isaac: I have looked at the Kindle DX and it is a great reader. Unfortunately I don’t know of any way to link it up to Dropbox for browsing. A Kindle DX running iOS or Android would be great.

  20. What about installing Dropbox on a server, and whipping up a simple script with a web interface that lets you browse your dropbox contents and email a selected one to the kindle?

    Then you could select files using the Kindle’s web browser, and view them as soon as the email is delivered.

    Might be able to use something like Syncplicity (http://www.labnol.org/internet/office/backup-and-sync-google-docs-files/5188/) to get files corresponding to your Google Documents into Dropbox. I haven’t used it but it claims to be a gdocs-dropbox bridge.

  23. RN: What’s different about the Ideapad K1 than other Android tablets? It comes bundled with a Documents to Go app, but otherwise I can’t see what makes it uniquely suited to reading (and the fact that they spec the machine as having an “HD Glare” screen is not confidence-inspiring, though the 1280×800 resolution (same as Motorola Xoom) is higher than the iPad 2’s and therefore maybe better for reading).

  25. For $139 it has just 2 GB of memory, but that’s fine since I don’t need the documents to be persistent on the device.

    You can open up the Nook and put in an SD card to add more memory if you want to. The manual describes how to do it.

    I don’t think you can install apps on the black-and-white Nook — at least, I haven’t seen an obvious way, but I didn’t go hunting for it. And the devkit is only for the color Nook so I didn’t bother.

    The black-and-white Nook includes a decent-enough web browser, but I haven’t tried reading Word documents on it. Probably not easy to do.

Comments are closed.