TTRPGs, PDFs, and a Very Cheap Tablet

The problem

I've been wanting to start playing tabletop role playing games (TTRPGs) again. I used to play them a lot in high school and college, but until I joined a remote game for a podcast a few years ago, it had been close to 20 years since I had played one. COVID lockdowns gave me the urge to play remotely, but I was so busy at home I didn't ever get around to it, though I did buy some TTRPG products, in digital media form.

The thing about TTRPG rulebooks and supplements, which has been true since the 90s, AD&D 2d edition, and the White Wolf World of Darkness games, is that they are mostly printed on glossy paper, with lots of color illustrations and really intensive layout. Two columns of text, interrupted in fancy shapes by illustrations running in from the sides. Some independent games are simpler, but this is the standard that most games aspire to, and with D&D 5e, it's especially intense.

I generally prefer to read things on my ebook reader, a Kobo Clara HD, running KOReader. It has a six inch grayscale screen, and it is /not/ good for reading PDFs with complex layout. If you fit a full page on screen, the text is too small to read. Backgrounds and textures behind text tend to make the contrast poor. Reading two columns means zooming into the left column, scrolling down, scrolling back up and zooming into the right column, rinse, repeat. KOReader actually has /amazing/ facilities for dealing with a lot of these problems. It has a "dewatermark" function that mostly removes background textures. It is able to smart zoom to text, including zooming to columns and linearizing the process of reading two-column text. The problem is that this is both slow, and fallible. What I really want is an ePub or similar reflowable format, with the pictures as full-page plates. This doesn't work for TTRPG designers; although they often sell ebook versions, they design strictly for paper, and the ebooks are just PDFs of the print version.

So how about reading on my laptop? It's a bit faster anyway, and the backgrounds, images, and textures are no problem because of the color screen. But columns are still a problem, since the screen is wide and the page is tall. Fit a page to screen width, and you page down to read one column, page up to read the next. Fit a page to screen height, and it's too small to read. This situation could be rectified with an external monitor in portrait orientation, but I currently don't have one, and it wouldn't be portable, anyway.

So I decided to get a tablet /strictly/ for the purpose of reading PDFs and comic books, the things that don't work well on my other devices. It wouldn't have to be fast, it wouldn't have to have a great screen, just be usable for those two purposes.

The tablet

I originally wanted to get a 10 inch or larger tablet, with the idea that it would be big enough to read RPG hardback/trade paperback text without squinting. However, I really, really didn't want to spend much money on this experiment. Times are tight right now.

One thing that kept coming up, though, was a tablet called the Q-Link Scepter 8. It was an 8 inch tablet, which might not be big enough, but the going price was around $27 with free shipping, and I found one for $10 with $10 shipping. Basically cheap enough for me to buy even if it didn't turn out to be usable. I loved my 2012 Nexus 7 tablet (7 inch), but it was definitely not big enough to read full RPG PDF pages in portrait. It was pretty good for comic books in landscape, though, and I was hoping the extra width of the Q-Link Scepter 8 would make the difference.

So what is this $20 tablet? Apparently, they were specifically manufactured for the FCC's Emergency Broadband Benefit Program during the COVID-19 lockdowns. As a WiFi tablet, they don't actually provide any broadband connectivity themselves, but I assume they were given to schoolchildren as a way to do remote schoolwork. (Actually, a Reddit thread I found confirms that this was their purpose, but to get the "free" tablet, you had to pay $10 fees, and the recipients almost universally regarded them as useless garbage, not even worth $10). I believe that many people who received these as part of the government program are reselling them, and good on them for getting some benefit from it.

That said, I ordered it before I knew any of this history.

Out of the box, from a factory-reset state, the experience of using this tablet was atrocious. The usual Android setup (set up WiFi, set up Google account — which I skipped) was extremely slow. In addition to that, it also installed a vendor-provided "Free WiFi" app that it used to connect rather than the built-in WiFi settings. There is also a vendor-supplied setup app that gives you a survey (which I skipped) and then installs apps recommended based on your answers. It is very hard to keep it from doing this, and during the time in which I was setting the tablet up, it was continually installing unwanted apps, and everything I tried to do was extremely slow.

The good news is that it was possible to disable that app through Application Info settings, as well as almost all of the preinstalled system apps. It was even possible to disable Google Play Services! I installed F-Droid, uninstalled the browser I used to install it, then installed a number of different reader apps. I also enabled Developer Options and turned down the background apps limit to 2.

The results

Amazingly, after disabling almost everything, the tablet was actually pretty snappy, at least for document viewing. I did install a more stripped-down web browser (tried both Firefox Focus and Bromite) on it, but was still only barely usable for web browsing. Good enough to download a better wallpaper, but I feel really sorry for the kids trying to run school apps like Clever on them.

I opened up one of the "Star Trek Adventures" PDFs I recently got from a Humble Bundle sale, and gave it a shot. For me, the size of a page of text from the rulebook fit to the size of the screen was a little too small for me to comfortably read. It's close, though. I think if it had been an 8" screen with a 3x4 aspect ratio rather than a 9x16 aspect ratio, it would have been okay. On the plus side, it's tall enough to fit one full /column/ of text in an easy to read size, and it's not too big a deal to scroll /once/ to read a second column of text.

For the price, I am calling it a win, since my TTRPG PDFs have become usable, rather than nearly useless. But anyone in the same situation would be better off with the cheapest used 10 inch tablet they can find, preferably in a 3x4 aspect ratio. It wouldn't need to be new; this tablet only has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, which is less than my Nexus 7 had in 2012.

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