Traded my old Asus Eee PC in for a Nexus 7 a few weeks ago, the Eee is still a great little laptop, but becoming rather dated: would take 10 minutes to boot up Windows and then the battery life was only about 3 hours or so. Been putting off getting a tablet until there was one that did everything I wanted and was compatible with everything I wanted, but it seems that is still a while off, so after deciding I liked the portability of the smaller tablets out there spent a while comparing the merits of the Nexus, iPad mini, Kindle Fire and Blackberry Playbook, and in my book the Nexus was a clear winner for what I wanted (and a reasonable price). I had to compromise on lack of support for external cards, no rear facing camera, no Flash and no video output, but on other things it was just what I was after and I’ve been happy with the results and the increased productivity and less paper to carry around. I had been using a regular Kindle to store pdfs so I had less to carry around all the time, but it really wasn’t up to the job.
The only thing missing was if I wanted to do more than the odd paragraph (even with the great gesture typing introduced with Andriod 4.2) a keyboard was really essential. Cue some internet research again and last week I became the proud owner of a HP Touchpad Bluetooth Keboard. Turn keyboard and Nexus bluetooth on and you’re connected within seconds, works like a dream. Even some of the “special” buttons (play music, brightness, volume), the keys have a good feel to them and aren’t too noisy, it seems fairly robust, and size makes it very portable which is obviously desirable. Only downside I have found so far is that you can select different keyboard layouts, but not English UK, so the @ and ” are in the wrong place for example, but I can live with that.
