Device for reading Go World Magazine in Digital Form

[Dokuganryu]

Hello everyone. Some time ago I have bought the DVD set of Go World Magazine, and start to wonder what device would be best to use for reading them. I am looking for a device that I could place near my board so I could review for example the game commentary.

There are two main alternatives that I can think off:

1. E-book reader, like Kindle Paperwhite
2. A full blown tablet

I would be much more interested in a e-book reader, because it is more suitable to read books on it, it has more powerful battery and doesn't offer options like facebook browsing (which for me is a good thing;))

But as my main motivator for a purchase is reading the Go World Magazine, I am mostly interested how these devices would cope with it, the diagrams it consist, etc.

Can anyone share their thought about it?

[oren]

I do read Go World on a Nexus 7 quite a bit. However, since it's a PDF scan of a bigger format, much of the text is smaller than really intended to be. It's workable, but not as good as on the Nexus 10 I've used to play with as well. For e-books then 7" is much better since I dislike the extra size for books. All I can say after that is try to find a way to try it out on the device you want to purchase.

[imabuddha]

Looks great on my full-size iPad.

[Boidhre]

For reading pdfs it's hard to beat a full sized tablet. Smaller tablets suffer from the problem oren mentioned of pdfs not being made with a 7" screen in mind and e-readers like Kindles have even worse problems. You can read a pdf on a Kindle but it isn't enjoyable.

I'd go with an iPad or a Nexus 10 (personally I'd go with the iPad for SmartGo books and other good go apps) and just not install the Facebook app.

[logan]

I have a Kindle paperwhite and Go World isn't very practical on it. I recommend a larger display.

The original publication size is a good indicator of how easily it will be to read on a Kindle (i.e. large format books won't scale well, but medium/small formats often will).

[lobotommy]

iPad with Retina display. The screen is so high res you can read a whole page without zooming in. Probably every other tablet with high res screen will do the job, but go apps on iOS are in par with desktop apps, and because of that for a go player it is the only reasonable choice.

[tchan001]

So you are saying my Samsung Galaxy TAB 10.1 is not a reasonable choice because it is not iPad with Retina.

[Boidhre]

So you are saying my Samsung Galaxy TAB 10.1 is not a reasonable choice because it is not iPad with Retina.

There are only two issues really:

Crisper text because of the greater resolution with the Retina display over the Galaxy Tab display.
The iOS App Store has exclusive go apps whereas Android doesn't have any that don't have equivalents on iOS.

Either of these might justify the much greater cost of the iPad for you or they may not. Also this only considers go and ignores other reasons you might favour Android over iOS as an operating system.

[tchan001]

Well if you want something which handles most go programs desired by go players, why not consider a windows 8 touchscreen tablet

Would you still say that the iPad is the only reasonable choice?

[Boidhre]

Well if you want something which handles most go programs desired by go players, why not consider a windows 8 touchscreen tablet

Would you still say that the iPad is the only reasonable choice?

Windows 8 Tablet? It lacks the power to run any of the AIs well unless you're talking about the likes of an i5 Surface Pro which is very pricey for a tablet and a Go AI eats battery life even with more power efficient processors than an i5. It lacks SmartGo Books etc. You can play go on it on online servers but you can do that on other tablets too, just not on KGS and that's changing with the HTML5 version coming. I suppose you could use it for database work but I don't find the idea of shelling out for another tablet just for that appealing and really, that's not an activity you absolutely have to be able to do *anywhere*.

The Windows 8 Tablets are odd, you can run desktop apps which is very nice but the vast majority aren't touch optimised yet, equally the touch app store is very young and not fully developed yet. It'd be very nice to have a true competitor to iOS and Android here as both have quite serious flaws, so I'm hoping things improve.

[oren]

I have been considering getting a new Ultrabook once the Haswell based systems are out. I think that will be a nice toy. I remembered this thread today and started reading Go World on my Nexus 7 and found it wasn't as bad as I thought. The resolution is good so you just have to accept the font is a bit smaller than default, but it worked well.

I find it a really nice portable device for Go.

[tchan001]

Well I seriously prefer my Samsung Galaxy TAB 10.1 over the iPad for the simple reason that I love having a micro SD card slot which I have fitted with a 64G external card
If I were to carry around the bulk of the digitized Go World Magazines on a tablet, I'd like to place it on external memory rather than internal
In fact, I could probably fit all the digitized Go World Magazines, all the digitized Go Review magazines, all the digitized Weiqi Tiandi and still have room for lots of other things on mainly external memory:)

[Ember]

At the moment I don't own any of the mentioned devices (although I plan to buy a Galaxy Tab 2 10" in the near future) but would definitely prefer a 10" tablet over an ebook-reader. One reason is that I think the size of a 10" tab is nicer for reading than the smaller screen ebook readers have. I'm not an expert in this field, but to me it seems better to have a bigger screen for files such as the Go World PDFs, which aren't exactly made for ebook readers, are the? The other reason is that the device can be used for other stuff as well such as surfing, not to mention all those nice apps out there.

@ tchan001: As I'm going to buy a Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 I'm interested to read how you got that 64GB micro SD working in your tab? The specifications say it's only possible to use micro SDHC cards with up to 32GB and I frequently read of problems with the micro SDXC cards in the tab.

[tchan001]

It's working fine on my Tab and I currently have quite a few things on it
I had heard about the problems with SDXC as well, but I wanted to try it out and I had other devices I could try out as well. Turns out to be a winner for me and my 10.1
How did I get it to work on my TAB? I just stuck it in my TAB and it worked. I have all the latest updates provided by Samsung and it's not rooted.

[Ember]

tchan001, that sounds great, thank you for your answer! It's awesome that there's no formatting or other stuff to be done. Would you mind telling me which card exactly you put into your tab? I'd like to get the same one so I wouldn't risk that the card I buy doesn't work (whyever). I don't have any other devices to use it with and don't wanna test 'em all if something goes wrong..