I got a new toy yesterday. It’s a Samsung Tab 2. It’s just like my phone, only bigger and better (except for the lack of 3G, that is).

Anyway, Seymour and I made a deal a couple of months back – he could get a new toy if I could and yesterday, I finally procured said toy. I’ve been playing around with it after downloading a bunch of apps last night and I think I love it. Sure, I would have adored an Asus Slider or Transformer, but I’ve had good luck with my two Samsung phones and the Asus tablets were out of my price range.

Seymour was astonished when I told him what I wanted. “You want an e-reader?!” he exclaimed. “I thought you hated them!” And therein lies my dilemma.

See, I love Star Trek. Love it. And whenever some sort of Star Trek-inspired bit of technology becomes a reality, I grow giddy. However, I’ve been slow to embrace the e-reading revolution. A devoted bibliophile, I will be the little old lady who ends up crushed to death in her library by an enormous stack of dusty old hardcovers. I’ve got the Kindle apps for both Android and PC and have downloaded a ton of books from the free classics section of the Kindle store. Heck, I released Tuesday Daydreams for Kindle (with other e-reading formats coming soon, I promise!). Do I recognize that e-reading is the wave of the future? Absolutely. But am I ready to fully embrace it? Not just yet.

You see, curling up under a blanket, mug of cocoa in hand, on a frigid winter’s day is just not the same with an e-reader as it is with a book. By book, I am, of course, referring to an actual physical, dead-tree book. There’s just no way to accurately recreate that experience within a digital format.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like my Kindle apps and the ability to carry a ton of books around with me without giving myself a hernia. However, the advent of things such as e-readers and iPads means that my kids will never know the joy of lugging around their weight in books as they proceed from one class to the next during their high school and college years. The fact that they will instead be toting around school-issued iPads with all their books, homework, and other educational necessities loaded on them depresses me more than I can say.

I’ve composed this brief opinion on my new toy as a means of testing out the keypad and I think I like the one on my phone better, if only because its smaller size makes it easier to hold onto it and type at the same time. Still, I think I’m going to like this iteration of mobile computing. My pretty new Tab is certainly lighter than my laptop, anyway. 🙂

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