Tablets vs. Laptops vs. Smartphones

When I get bored, I like to browse around online and watch videos of the latest and greatest technology offerings. The past few years have been exciting, to say the least. With the onset of cloud computing, real smartphones, tablets and touchscreens, I can’t seem to keep up. Just yesterday, I decided to actually start processing what I’ve been reading and watching.

True story: On my way back from Jiu-Jitsu class yesterday morning, I received a call informing me that one of my sites was down. I also received an email telling me the same thing. Since I was already on the road on my way back to the house, I decided to maintain some sort of self-control and let things ride until I was able to handle them correctly. By the time I got back, the server administrators had already taken care of the issue and all I had to do was some minor maintenance. Even though the situation didn’t warrant red-alert, it did make me wonder what I could have done if things were more serious.

I’ve recently been looking at three primary players in the mobile world; the smartphone, the tablet and the laptop. I’m trying to figure out a way to combine the best features of each into one unit. Needless to say, I’ve yet to find a way to do this. Here’s the thing:

– My smartphone is awesome. I’ve got the Droid RAZR MAXX and have nothing but good experiences with it.

Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX Ice Cream Sandwich Walkthrough

– I’ve been wanting to get into reading more books via a tablet. I’ve already added some of the free classics from Amazon to my account. I can see them on my phone, but I’m truly not the type of person to be reading books on my phone. I need to keep a semblance of dignity here. Yeah, until I started seeing videos of the Samsung Galaxy Note II.

Samsung Galaxy Note II Review

The Samsung has got a relatively huge screen when compared to other smart phones. People are calling them “Phablets” because they are a combination of the smartphone and the tablet. It makes me wonder if I could read a book on this thing.

Now, back to the issue I encountered yesterday when the website was unavailable. How would I have dealt with that? Could a full size tablet have handled it? Or perhaps if I had my laptop with me? The laptop is what I work on everyday anyway, so yes, I could have used my phone as a hotspot, gotten connection to the internet and used my FTP program to juggle some stuff around. But what about a tablet? I wouldn’t have had my FTP program, so I wouldn’t have been able to connect to the server.

Just this morning, I looked to see if there were online FTP programs that could have helped me. Yes, there are, but once I saw that they asked for my server address, login and password, I said, “Yeah right.” I did expect something like that though.

So, the FTP program, photo editing, movie editing and real typing are the reasons I’ve already found that I can’t use a tablet for daily use. I would like to, but it’s going to be a few years. Perhaps when they start encrypting Google Drive and making tablet processors more powerful, I’ll take another look, but until then, I’ll consider the tablet for mere reading and web browsing.

Now, the smartphone vs. the tablet thing is totally different. I will tell you that I would give up my smartphone today for a tablet that’s capable of making phone calls. Add a Bluetooth headset to that and we’ve got a winner. I’m pretty sure that this will become widely available soon because the competition is so hot in this area, but again, until it’s mainstream, I’ll wait.

The question remains though; do I really need three devices? Really? When I’m trying to simplify my life?

I found a pretty good video that deals with this issue, but I’d love to have some back and forth in the comment area below. What do you currently have? What’s your favorite? If you had to give one of them up, which one would it be?