Over the years I've had a lot of cheap Android tablets. I started with a Hisense Sero Pro 7, which was actually a good tablet until it decided to stop charging. I then started using my daughter's old (and no longer used by her Nexus 7), which also stopped charging not long after I started using it. And then I got a 2nd gen Kindle Fire. Which actually is still working but it's old hardware and it doesn't even run the latest Fire OS. If you can get a modern app on it, the tablet has to work so hard that the battery drains very quickly.

So for Christmas I bought my wife an iPad and myself a more top-of-the-line Android tablet – a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2. It has a seemingly square screen but that doesn't bug me like I thought it would. The screen is very clear, and the colors are crisp. The tablet is understandably snappy. The battery life is amazing (and as of yet hasn't caught fire. ☺). And it has a lack of cruft on it – Microsoft Office apps and a news app. That's about it.

As an experiment, I haven't put anything work-related on it. I have one Google Account, but not my work one and have not configure my personal email account on there either. And no Slack, no social media apps. Not even a streaming app. It's mainly for "consuming" – lots of board game apps and reading (Feedly, Instapaper, etc). Surprisingly I've been doing the most is reading books, thanks to the excellent Moon+ Reader Pro app. That deserves it's own blog post.

It's been nice having a device that does what you want and it not always trying to get your attention with notifications.