A while back, I bought an Asus EeePad Transformer. A bit later I bought the base unit which has a keyboard and extra battery. I still love it. Being able to switch between landscape and portrait orientation on a whim is really awesome, because so many sites look so much better in one format. The battery life is phenomenal. I can get a full day of near-continuous use with the tablet alone, and the battery in the base is even bigger. It’s even smart about draining the base-unit battery to keep the built-in one as full as possible.
The last couple of days, I had to travel to NYC, so I decided to experiment with using this as my travel computer. I did bring another (small) laptop along just in case, but resolved not to use it – and I didn’t, except as a reserve battery for my MiFi portable wireless gadget. However, I have run into two serious limitations. One is that I can’t use it for presentations. Besides the fact that it physically has only a (mini) HDMI whereas most projectors are still VGA, I can’t find any decent software for presentations. I’ve looked at several apps and a couple of online services. They’re all awful. Is it too much to ask that a presentation program handle a simple two-level bullet list properly? Apparently. The other problem is that I can’t really use this thing for terminal sessions. The base-unit keyboard actually lacks an escape key. As a vi user, that’s crippling. I could use emacs instead, but the handling of the control key also seems a bit erratic. I tried using the on-screen escape key in ConnectBot, but eventually settled on using Hacker’s Keyboard instead. While I was able to get some work done (Gluster guys: that’s how I did the quorum-optional patch) it was certainly not very pleasant. I’d like to avoid solutions that require rooting the device, but I might have to resort to that.
I still love using the EeePad at home, and in meetings. I just might not be able to use it as a road machine and that makes me sad. Maybe the software situation will improve over the next year or so.
Have you tried the web based presentation tools (e.g. Google’s?) I’ve seen people dogfooding that and it didn’t seem too bad…
I tried Google Docs, but it was pretty much a disaster. IIRC, the worst problem was that the apparent and actual location of my cursor would get out of sync. That’s a problem I’ve seen on lots of sites, across three browsers, when they get too fancy with all the AJAX stuff. It’s really sad that Google’s own sites don’t work with the built-in browser on their own OS, but there it is. When I get some time I’ll give Zoho a try and see if they do any better.
Does ctrl-[ work as an alternative for escape? I remember using it on terminals years ago that didn’t have a physical escape key for whatever strange reason.
I was pretty sure I had tried it, but I retried after seeing your suggestion. Sadly, it seems to generate an escape *plus* some other characters (at least a ‘p’ because it ends up pasting extra stuff in vi). :(
use something like ‘beamer’ to produce a complete PDF of the presentation; open the PDF in presentation mode and you’re there.