3 Months with my iPad Mini

3 months in, and there are only a handful of apps that I use regularly whenever i am using the iPad mini.The top few most used app are  the Kindle app for reading all my favourite e-books, The New Yorker app, for reading my favourite weekly magazine, the National Geographic app to the Nat Geo in its digital format, fully interactive and content rich and Clipboard for all my daily news feeds.

Of course, those are not the only apps that are installed on my iPad mini. But the ones mentioned here are the ones I used most regularly. And nothing can be more true when people say that tablets are mainly used as a physical medium for consumption, rather than productivity. Do I blog on the iPad mini? Rarely. Do I take pictures and post them on social media using the iPad mini? Almost never. Do I create spreadsheets and word documents on the iPad mini? Nope. And so, after 3 months of using the device, my style of usage is one of consumption, rather than that of  creation and productivity. I still feel that a PC desktop or a laptop is still the main mode of content creation. Like right now, drafting this post that you are reading. I am writing a rough draft of this post on Evernote. I can make changes to it easily, basic markup functionalities are present that would help me finalise my draft before posting on the blog. With the iPad mini, it is difficult for me. Not entirely impossible, but it can be done so much faster and more efficiently with a proper keyboard, especially when you are required to type long passages. Typing on a tablet is quite tedious in my opinion and it is more suited for short sentences, phrases, or shout-outs on social media.

I don’t play games on a tablet. Tablet games do not interest me. I find most of them shallow and unimpressive. They are simply games that captures your short attention spans and just feeds off of it, creating a craving that just shorten your attention span even further. And they can be a waste of time. I would rather read an article on the web, continue reading on my e-book where I left off, or learn something new reading National Geographic than play mindless games. I would love to subscribe to more magazines like Wired, The Economist or Scientific American, but I have only so many hours in a day where I can spend time reading. It would be waste if I were to subscribe to it and not read it at the end. So I have to be selective in what I read. The books that interest me, the articles that captivates me and the stories that captures my imagination.