After the beginning of August, thanks to contributors, I had the cash I needed to get a Tracfone going. I needed that for local communications while the iPhone went to the city for repair. Virtually all my remaining ready cash went to the city with the iPhone. On the very Monday when I planned to buy the phone I got a text from Big Brother. BB had noticed that his tablet computer, nearly identical to mine, had a slot for a SIM card. If I moved my iPhone’s SIM card to my tablet, could it not perhaps serve as a telephone?
As you know Uncle Joel is not exactly a luddite. But he has definitely not kept current with the latest and greatest nor even the generations immediately preceding the latest and greatest. After nearly a decade and a half of hermitdom I increasingly rely on flapping my eyelashes at more clued-in friends and saying, “I’m old and out of it. Take care of this for me.*” I didn’t really believe the tablet had a phone function – but what the hell, my phone has a camera. So why not? And figuring out how to swap the card from one gadget to another was not beyond my competence.
As soon as I had done that thing, the tablet suddenly became much more capable though not stretching quite to the point of voice telephony. In fact for a while it worked as a dandy hotspot for my laptop though now for some reason it has ceased to do so. That means that at this moment I’m bypassing the laptop entirely and typing on the tablet using a bluetooth keyboard. My capabilities don’t quite reach as far as photographs: Obviously the tablet can take pictures but manipulating those pics and moving them between apps has so far escaped me. Either way I was never quite as offline as originally planned though I have spent the past couple of weeks not more than glancing at the news. Have the cities burned yet?
More later, as we’re not quite up to date…
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*At the moment she reads this, Landlady will roll her eyes hard enough to affect local weather.
Like me , getting draged into the brave new world whether I like it Ior not
I have found that I can get remarkably better results with connectivity sometimes by simply plugging an appropriate usb cable between my laptop and(pick one)phone,camera or tablet. The laptop sees what I’ve plugged in then it’s off to the races. The charging cable for both my tablet and phone plugs into the wall wart changer(and also unplugs) Ymmv(also the cable that came with the external battery banks works the same way
What Brad said. USB tethering may be faster than WiFi tethering, and has less battery drain.