Tesco and the death of the Hudl

I haven’t had to think about what to write about lately – every time I sit down to write an email, there’s something happening in the news that I need to explain because so many papers and so on are making it sound more confusing than it is, from TalkTalk’s problems last time to what’s happening with the Hudl this time…

It saves me having to think which is handy, but I’d like nothing to go wrong next week, so I can get back to actually explaining how to do things with your PC or tablet!

Tesco and the death of the Hudl
You might have heard that Tesco are stopping selling the Hudl.  There’s been all sorts of kerfuffle about it and I know some people are a bit worried about what it means.

First of all, if you already own a Hudl, don’t worry, it doesn’t really affect you.  Yours will carry on working and they’ve said they’ll carry on supporting it with updates and so on.  Of course, eventually they’ll stop supporting it at some point – but that would have been true even if they had brought out a 3rd version of the Hudl.

If you’d been thinking of buying one, it’s more of an issue.  According to Tesco, they’re now sold out of the Hudl 2, the newer version.  Whether there are any stores with the odd one left I don’t know, but if there are, I don’t imagine they’ll last very long.

So if you want a new one you might have to choose a different make of tablet.  There are lots and lots – it’s hard to pick out a particular one because it depends on exactly you want from it and how much you’re happy to spend.  Generally I would advise people not to go for the Amazon Kindle Fire (which is their tablet, different from the Amazon Kindle or Kindle Paperwhite which are their ebook readers and which I do think are good if you want just an ebook reader).  The Kindle Fire won’t let you use some fairly common apps and websites (such as YouTube to watch videos on) which is why I’d generally stay away from it unless you’re absolutely sure you don’t want to do those things.

Using a Samsung or a Nexus tablet instead of the Hudl isn’t too different (and if you want help with it of course you can always get the book from us! Android Tablets One Step at a Time should help).

As I say, if you already have a Hudl, don’t worry, it doesn’t really affect you.  If you were thinking of buying one, well, it probably means you’ll have to choose a different one, but there are plenty of other good ones out there.

Have a smartphone?  Why I recommend downloading a not-too-interesting ebook
Personally, I often like reading paper books (I’m currently reading Graham Hill’s autobiography – not only is it a paper one but this particular copy is over 40 years old).  But I also read ebooks.

And generally, I tend to choose books I think I’ll find really interesting (did you know Graham Hill didn’t learn to drive until he was 24?  And still went on to win two formula one world championships.)

Pretty normal – I’d imagine most people read books they think they’ll really like.

But I also deliberately download some books I’m only a bit interested in.  Why?

Well, occasionally I find myself stuck somewhere for 15 minutes with nothing to do.  Maybe at a train station, or when we’ve gone shopping and Edward’s fallen asleep on the way, so I stay in the car with him.

Then I can pull out my phone and read an ebook I’ve downloaded onto it.  I don’t normally use my phone to read books as it’s a bit awkward, but it’s OK if I’m stuck.

But if I download something really interesting, I’ll just end up reading it straight away.  Then when I’m stuck outside Tesco waiting for Julie to do the shopping, I’ll have nothing to do.  So I download something only a bit interesting – and only read it when I’ve nothing else to do.

It might be worth doing, if you have a smartphone that can handle ebooks, but that you don’t normally want to read books on.