What is your preferred device for reading programming books?

Hmm? My family and I went out to the lake on Sunday (yesterday), they went out jetskiing and I stayed on shore (I don’t like being on water). I listened to music on my phone (Pixel 2 XL with Android P), listened to music for about 3 hours, read for most of the rest of the time we were there (total of 10 hours with no power source) and my phone was down to 81%, and it was not fully charged when we got there (close enough though, 98% I think, continued to not charge it until this morning when I woke up to it at ~35% but my phone stays active all night as it records my physical information while I sleep, not a very battery friendly act as it is using both the wifi and bluetooth). I’m not sure where this paragraph of yours comes from?

As a comparison, my mother-in-law’s iPhone X died while we were there and she spent almost all her time out in the water with her phone tucked safely on shore and it was fully charged when arrived.

Also, a ‘crush’? I’m not familiar with this terminology in this context? What be?

EDIT: As well as my phone was charged this morning for about 30 minutes bringing it back up to 83% and it’s been on with messaging via hangout, reddit, IRC, Discord, and a few other things being pretty constantly active (server at work is freezing a lot today, hate windows), screen has not shut down yet (timeout it set to 10 minutes, it’s not hit it yet today) and the phone is at 72% at 3:17pm / 15:17 today when it was charged at 9am to that 83%.

That is just my observation after using 14 Android devices over 5 or so years. Only had good battery life with a Sony and Xiaomi device so far. Heard Pixel 2 is economical several times.

Every smartphone, Android and iPhone alike, can die quickly if you leave all radios on and leave background app activity to run rampant.

In iOS I can disable background activity altogether. My X can stay idle for 8 days. 50 hours idle + 7 hours of usage – still 40% three days later. I love it.

(I usually only enable Bluetooth when I actually need it.)

I realize it’s a mixed bag but my experience, and that of a big group of people, has been that iOS is more reliable in terms of battery life. I know there are many Android users who say the same about Android.

Remember the Google ad that was mocking Apple for removing the headphone jack? What happened next year? Next Pixels have no 3.5 jack either. And this year the Pixel 3 XL sports a notch. And Android is moving to gesture navigation. I dunno, I see a trend. Not willing to argue though, it might be a collective coincidental evolution with exactly the same outcomes. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah it all depends on each persons usage. I use my phones heavily so I have it set to aggressive battery saving in the system settings and so forth. If I enable airplane mode and enable full battery saver my phone could easily stay idle for days as well, it tends to drop less than 5% a day in that mode but I’ve never gone longer than about 2 days when I was camping.

I havn’t seen a commercial in at least a decade, I stream tv shows if I watch any… ^.^;

I do hate the missing headphone jack though, and I actually ‘prefer’ thicker phones than my pixel 2 xl is (and I want an even larger screen! blah).

Gesture navigation I already had via addons pre androidP though, my phone is… not really a stock android experience by far. My browser ‘tabs’ are floating bubbles, as are messages, quick swipes around the screen for different application access, etc… etc… Having over 900 apps installed now means I had to come up with efficient ways to access it all. ^.^;

Well I thought I’d wait for the Black Friday sales to pick up an Oasis - but they didn’t come on sale!! :icon_rolleyes:

I suppose it’s only a month till Christmas so might wait until then, otherwise I might check out the new (full sized) iPads (got a mini) - as much as I don’t like reading on LCD screens, they’re arguably better for new code snippets or clicking through to the full page of code as discussed in this thread…

Anyone else get anything or changed what they read on since we last spoke?

For me it depends where I am. A lot of the time, I just use iBooks with my ePubs on my MacBook, which works fine when I’m sitting upright somewhere or even on my bed.

However, I recently got a Kindle Oasis over the summer and I prefer to use that. It works better in the dark and won’t keep me up with all the light like my Laptop does. I can lie down and turn all over and still hold it like a book, which is nice. Some people have said that it doesn’t work well for programming books which is partly true. Some books (especially PDFs) don’t look great and the snippets don’t fit well so they have to wrap around. However, overall I still like it since its much smaller to read on and I can read it no matter how I’m sitting or laying, or even in the bright sun outside.

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I’m loving my iPad Pro for this. You can open PDFs in Good Notes and write notes/highlight etc right on the document. Very handy.

I’ve ordered a better case for it so it’s more convenient to stand up next to my laptop cannot arrive soon enough.

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For an iPad Pro I highly recommend the ZuguCase – me and my wife both use one and it’s very handy to quickly adjust the angle on the magnetic base. As far as I can tell, radio signal has never been affected by the magnet.

That’s exactly what is being shipped to me now! Their ‘Muse’ case for the 12.9" iPad Pro. I currently just have a super cheap crappy faux-leather case which can barely stand itself up.

New Kindle Oasis due out next month - glad I waited now as it has a warm light feature!

I will probably wait until it goes on sale before buying it though - sure last year they went for as low as £179 on Prime day or one of the other seasonal sales.

Does this require an internet connection? I’d very much like to use something like that but never give it access to any cloud servers (especially Amazon’s!). Can it serve as a dumb offline reader which you can fill with your own EPUB collection?

Yes and no, you can connect Kindles via usb and manually copy over books - unless you buy them from Amazon afaik, as they are sent directly to your Kindle - but they have to be .mobi or pdf IIRC. I would only use a Kindle to read .mobi files tbh, pdfs are not great, again at least not on mine (which is a good few years old).

You can switch the wifi on/off (mines usually off to preserve battery life).

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Look what I got - the new Kindle Oasis :smile:

I love it :orange_heart: the warm light is definitely worth it, however, there is a design flaw where it is slightly darker on the handle/button side. I actually have two here and they’re exactly the same. It’s not a huge deal but I’d have thought they’d engineer it so it wasn’t an issue. Either way I highly recommend it :023:

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Can it work 100% offline?

The set-up asked me to enter wifi password (to update it and connect to the Amazon store etc) but after that I put it into aeroplane mode - so the wifi is off. It does not need to be connected to the internet for you to read your books :023:

You can also email your books to your device, or connect it via USB and drag them to the documents folder :smiley:

Why not order one and give it a try? Amazon usually allow you 28 days to change your mind (just check this first!). I reckon you’ll love it :003:

I dunno, I live in Eastern Europe and never even attempted a return – I clearly remember the local UPS partner telling me once that any return postage is on me. So I guess things aren’t that well arranged around here. :thinking:

Do they ship from your country? Usually the retailer has to pay return postage if the product is faulty or ‘not fit for purpose’ - at least that is the law here. I don’t think I have ever paid return costs for an item sold by or through Amazon :slight_smile:

They ship to my country, but not from it. To be fair though, no idea how returns work.

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Could always sell on Ebay if you don’t like it? (I think you will tho :lol:)

I highly value your recommendations, man! Just not sure I want one more device lying around and having to manage, that’s all. :slight_smile: I’ll consider it.

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Does anyone have any changed or newer opinions?

I’ve got a lot of technical/programming ebooks I want to actually read through next year. I’ll probably be using it exclusively for those types of books as I like to listen to audiobooks for everything else.

I currently have a broken iPad mini which is a good size and has apps to read all of the books. The problem is that for some reason it never felt like I was reading a book. It may have been all of the distractions, the weight or simply just me but it wasn’t enjoyable.

I wish coloured eink readers were a big thing. I don’t particularly want to buy another Apple device but the cheaper Amazon Fire tablets have terrible resolution and brightness for daylight reading.