What are your LTE costs per GB? It hasn't caught on in Australia; you pay about $30AUD a month for about 5GB of total data traffic. If you have 5 devices you usually can't share it either so you either have to swap a lot of SIMs or that's $150 a month one for each.
Re:iPad Pro
by cstejerean on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @12:42AM
(#14494789)
In the US pretty much all carriers have moved to shared data plans where you can get a pool of data to share between all devices on the plan, which can include other family members.
I'm in Sweden and here you can pay $63/month to get a flatrate for calling/smm/mms/surfing + 100GB in EU/ESS, Malaysia and Thailand, and you can get a extra SIM card if you need one for another device.
But for me my company pays that anyway so I can get a new phone every year with basically free surfing in the whole EU, which is really nice.
It's not just the cost, but also the hassle of getting SIM cards, submitting documentation to get each (in India), paying multiple bills, tracking which plan you're on for each SIM card, and so on.
I use the Verizon LTE network on my iPad pro all the time. When I'm on the train, when I'm travelling hither and yon. I don't browse/read/search on my phone (which I use for actually calling and texting people). Not saying that I represent a typical consumer but I certainly represent at least a cohort of 1 consumers :-).
I had a MiFi for a while (company purchased), but found it consistently had lower performance then the native networking of my iPad and it was easy to lose if I wasn't paying attention. Twice I encountered times when it wasn't charged when I needed it. On analyzing it overall I found that because it wasn't forced to be charged when I charged my laptop/tablet, it suffered from sometimes being missed when it needed to be charged. That the radio is by definition charged when the iPad is charged avoids that failure mode for me.
When travelling with my SPro4 I would sometimes 'hot spot' it to my tablet. Awkward but it works. In the inversion that I still marvel about the software availability on the iPad has always been better than the availability of software on the SPro4.
The SPro4 has a better (to my taste) drawing experience than the iPad Pro does. And both the iPad Pro and SPro4 are way better than previous stylus attempts on capacitive screens.
The iPad has a much better 'tablet only' experience for me, and a much worse 'docked' experience. SPro4 with a Surface Dock and a couple of UHD monitors is literally indistinguishable from the NUC i7 box I use as a desktop. There is nothing (yet) that I can attach to my iPad Pro to make it work like a Macbook Pro (I know I know, different OS, processor etc.)
As a result I create more in general on my SPro4, consume more on my iPad Pro. I travel with my iPad in my hand and my SPro in my backpack.
Clearly I have been unable to leave one behind and just use the other so there is some more convergence to go :-)