Samsung Galaxy tab S: Split screen ideal for anki and pleco?

[Phil Wareham]

I just bought the pro pack for pleco, and found that it can be installed on up to three devices. I don't like switching between anki and pleco on my phone, so I'm tempted to get a shiny new tablet. Does anyone have the one mentioned up above? From what I can gather, the 10.5 inch model supports using two apps at once and the 12 inch model four apps at once, all split screen, which could be very useful for people like us. PDF reader on the left, dictionary on the right, anybody? Browser+dictionary? Anki+online dictionary and pleco on your phone? Still getting my head around it, but it's tempting. They have high res screens, so it wouldn't look bad. If Mike sees this, maybe he could chip in?

[mikelove]

We do support Samsung's split-screen UI mode, yes - we even monitor the clipboard while it's open, so if you copy a piece of text to the clipboard on one side of the split Pleco will automatically insert it into the search box in the other. However, not all Android apps support it (in fact most don't), since it's a proprietary Samsung API and not an official part of Android, so you might find that some of the apps that you'd want to run alongside Pleco don't actually work.

 

Alternatively, if you don't mind waiting a few months, there are strong indications that Apple's going to be introducing a split-screen mode on the iPad soon, and on that you'd also have the benefit of a much richer tablet ecosystem, and likely also much better app support since it would be an official Apple API. It's also a much better version of Pleco for two of the use cases that you mention, since our iOS app includes an embedded web browser and PDF reader, both with tap-lookup support. (both of those are coming on Android too, but we're not sure when - web browser is waiting on Android 4.4 with its much-enhanced embeddable web browser to be a reasonable minimum requirement, PDF is waiting on Android 5.0 with its embedded PDF decoder (not reliably available in previous versions))

 

(as far as your Pleco license goes, we can't activate Android copies of Pleco on iOS directly but we can activate iOS copies on Android, so if you wanted to make that switch just write us and we'll refund you for your Android purchase so that you can buy the iOS one instead)

[Flickserve]

I have the 12" Samsung.

There are a couple of things that limit the utility.

You can't open two PDFs/webpages at the same time in two screens using the same program. So if I wanted to compare two websites on the same screen, I have to use two different browsers.

I use a keyboard app called TouchPal to write the Chinese. This is actually the limiting factor:-

- in a landscape orientation, the English keyboard takes up half the screen. I can't adjust it smaller. It's really annoying as I don't need to touch type. Funnily enough, in portrait mode, the english keyboard can be made smaller.

- for Chinese writing again, the writing area is huge. There is no way to reduce it in either landscape or portrait mode (none that I can find).

- for Chinese writing, if you are slow with your strokes, another word pops up and the writing area will self clear. Very annoying for slow writers such as myself. The apple app is much better in that it's not time limited.

[Flickserve]

Just going to come back to this topic.

 

I bought the Samsung 12" tablet a while back. I had hoped to use it in another project.

 

Suffice to say it is a poor product and I'd advise anybody not to buy one. It 'looked good' in the shop

 

It is slow, the screen is unresponsive and generally speaking doesn't make life easier.

 

I don't know how people are managing to use this sort of tablet to take notes down - it's awful!

 

I probably would have been better off buying a surface pro 3.