Hardware

Hardware

My favourite and most commonly-used device is my Samsung Tab S8 Ultra:

• 14.6" OLED display
• 2960x1848 resolution
• 16:10 aspect ratio
• 8-core, 4nm processor
• 8GB RAM

The OLED (my favourite display tech along side e-ink) screen is gorgeous. Black is really black and running everything in dark OLED (black) UI modes gets a little more out of the battery too.

This tablet is roughly on par with average modern laptops in terms of power, but has some advantages for me.

Ergonomics

This is the main reason I generally prefer a tablet over a laptop. With a laptop the screen is attached to the keyboard, meaning:

• The display is always too low, so…
• you hunch over…
• which is bad for your back, and…
• …affects your breathing, as…
  • your shoulders turn inwards and compress your chest cavity, so…
  • your breaths will be shorter and more shallow…
  • increasing a tendency towards feeling stressed or anxious

This may seem over-the-top, but we programmers spend a lot of time sitting at our machines. There’s no such thing as a good position to sit in all day, our bodies expect and require movement (I certainly need a lot more) — but some positions are better than others.

Another benefit of using portable/mobile devices for work is that you aren’t chained to a desk, so can move around to different seating positions throughout the day. As a self-contained unit a laptop is good for this too, but you’re still stuck with the screen and keyboard being attached to one another.

I attach the tablet to a monitor arm so I can position it at a good height (ie with the top of the screen being just below eye level). But if I want to spend some time in a different position, I have a simple tablet stand which folds flat (so takes up very little storage space) and can easily be placed on top of books or boxes to elevate my tablet.

• Tablet arms
• Foldable tablet stand

Choice of Input Devices

In the past I’ve preferred ThinkPads for their great keyboards and little red TrackPoint pointing devices — I have an old but lovely X230 for when I do feel the need for a laptop.

Nowadays though, my favourite combo is a mechanical keyboard and trackball (the ‘fingers on top’ type of trackball suits me better than the ’thumb at the side’ type).

Of course these devices can be attached to laptops too, but then the laptop’s own keyboard and pointing device are just sitting there doing nothing. Laptops are good for travelling but for me sitting at home they’re a waste.

They used to make TVs with DVD players built-in, and common advice was that it wasn’t a wise buy, as if the DVD player stopped working you just had a wasted lump of electronics attached to your TV. I feel like this about laptops.

Ergodox Mechanical Keyboard

I like to use an Ergodox mechanical keyboard which I built myself from a kit and maintain (due to my terrible soldering joints regularly failing). This is a split keyboard, meaning it comes in 2 halves which can be positioned with a gap in the middle, allowing me to keep my arms a comfortable distance apart and avoid the hunching and bad posture. The keyboard is also programmable via the open source firmware QMK (great project btw).

As time goes by I am gradually removing keys from my layout and moving towards a layers/chording method of typing, meaning you have fewer keys and use more key combos. I’m ultimately aiming for a 40% layout (which vaguely means 40% of the number of keys on a normal keyboard). Fewer keys means fewer hand contortions and stretching fingers to fewer awkward positions, plus it makes the hardware smaller. Once I’m comfortable with that smaller number of keys I’ll build myself a Bluetooth LE Ferris keyboard or something similar.

My Ergodox is a wired USB version but I use it over Bluetooth via a BT500 Bluetooth adapter which converts any USB keyboard/mouse into Bluetooth. The BT500 is quite expensive for what it is (about $40) but I doubt they sell huge numbers of them so probably don’t have the economies of scale to make them cheaper. I had to order from the USA and wait a while to get it, but it’s a pretty cool and useful device.

Deft PRO Trackball

My trackball is a DEFT Pro. It works well for my purposes and feels comfortable enough. I try to use the keyboard instead of the pointer as much as possible but sometimes a mouse/trackball is needed, eg when editing images.

Power Management

Android/mobile devices treat this as an important feature whereas laptops don’t always take enough care over it, especially with Linux (where power management isn’t always the best, partly because device manufacturers don’t work as closely with Linux as they do Microsoft). This isn’t true for all laptops though, and things seem to be improving.

Most Android devices use ARM CPUs, which give strong performance for relatively low power usage.

I admit that Windows and MacOS tend to be better-tuned for power efficiency, but if I had to use those OSes I’d be wishing for my battery to die, just so I could stop. So, swings and roundabouts.

Adaptable and Easy to Store

I can be writing code one minute and very quickly change to watching a film or casual web browsing handheld mode the next.

As I’m often relying entirely on solar power for my electricity, being able to minimise the number of devices I need to keep charged up is a real benefit for me.

Also, living in a small space, tablets are flat and thin — so very efficient in terms of storage. Several can be stacked up on top of each other and take up no more space than a large book.