I Can't Find a Single Productive Use For My Tablet

You are allowed to find a device useful (i.e. gain value out of it) without being productive on it. That is why e-Readers sell a lot - they are useful. We're arguing about productive use cases here and that in my mind does not include commenting on facebook walls. If that is a narrow viewpoint then that's fine with me.

I found the iPad to be a better media consumption device than my laptop. Which means that I rarely spend my non-productive time on the laptop. Which in turn creates a higher spatial divide between work and entertainment, creating designated places for each. That alone makes me less likely to procrastinate and more productive.

under the assumption that something like "reading a book" is considered productive

1) surfing the web from my couch

2) some games like plants vs. zombies are sublime on a tablet, much better than on a pc imho

3) pdfs read much better than on a pc or a kindle

4) comic books (cbz and cbr files) on a ~10" tablet are almost as good as the real thing

5) when docked, my tablet makes a fantastic picture frame showing the photos in my google+ account

6) there's some music production software that are really quite good, I like Caustic myself, there's similar for iOS.

7) lots and lots and lots of pretty decent painting apps

8) I use it to see notifications, task, etc. things that I've entered from my PC into some "cloud" service. calendars, trello tasks, etc. Just bringing my tablet into a meeting with trello pulled up on it makes it seem like a have a super human memory and is far less intrusive than a laptop

9) use it as a third monitor, there's some great wifi streaming apps that tell your OS to use it as another monitor. Sure it's a bit slow, but if I stash my email program over there, or a shell that's tailing a log or something, it's perfectly adequate

10) better yet, just put a shell app on there direct and ssh into the server and tail the app that way, keeping tabs on a long running startup process while I'm in the bathroom has never been easier

11) remote to my PC running VLC...it's awesome for this, I can seek fast forward and rewind, control volume, pause play, whatever...custom home touch panel remotes don't hold a candle to this

things I don't do

try to type non-trivial amounts of text quickly without a keyboard, which is where most of the examples from this post are about, which is weird since he's using a transformer prime...who's entire point is the keyboard dock

"Productive" is used in its more literal definition here: producing, m/aking, creating. It doesn't have to be shakespeare or picasso to still be a creative work.

Tablets make a great 2nd (or 3rd) screen to supplement your computer workstation. You can keep reference material open on the tablet, which is a good read-only device. The one missing link is cut-and-paste from tablet to PC, and there are apps for that.

With browser sync, you can look something up on the main screen, then carry the tablet to the lunchroom (or toilet) to read it.

Tablets are fantastic for children. If you have kids, you may find that they take to it like a fish to water. You may want to steer them toward educational nature videos and math games, rather than mind-numbing running games like Temple Run, just to justify all that time they could have spent reading a book or playing ball outdoors.

Tablets are handy for reading or watching shows in the dark. My wife and I are watching Downton Abbey in bed. It's not ideal--I wish I had a robot arm thingie to hold the tablet rather than having it balanced on my chest, digging a ditch into my skin. But it's good enough; easy to pause and go back to catch what they said (we're not British and the dialects are sometimes tough to follow).

Basically, tablets are quite useful, and there's about 100 million users just in the U.S., so they must be doing something right! What's more, I suspect we've only scratched the surface of what these gadgets can do.