My Grocery Shopping “Adventure” with the Tablet

Yesterday we finally went out to get some long overdue groceries. Earlier in the day I used MindManager to map out my grocery list. It was totally unnecessary, and major overkill, but for whatever reason, I did it. 🙂 Actually, besides just playing around with MM, I had some dishes I wanted to prepare this week, so I made subtopics for them, and listed the ingredients I needed to buy for each one as sub-subtopics, if that makes sense. Anyway, I set up MM to show my list in outline form to see what it looked like, and saw it was a perfectly acceptable grocery list. *smirk* I realized that I didn’t reinstall my printer driver after I had restored my TPC a couple months ago (good sign of how paperless I am!), so I just decided that I would take the M200 to the store with me. I figured it would be interesting to see how well it works, the M200 being a lot bigger than a PDA or my pocket Moleskine, the usual grocery list repository of choice.

I put my tablet to sleep after setting up MM to display my list in outline mode. After stopping at a couple other places, we finally got to the grocery store. I found that my tablet could be propped up in slate mode in the front of the cart (the kid seat part), at a comfortable reading angle (and it wasn’t that obvious that I had a computer in the cart this way!). Earlier I’d bought a Sony Vaio neoprene case for my M200 so that I could have it covered up as I carried it into the store; it was used as a cushion under the M200 after I propped it up in the cart.

For the most part, the tablet worked very well as a hands-off grocery list, but I was very aware that I had a computer in my cart — my primary computer in my shopping cart. I was worried someone would spot it, grab it, and take off with it, so I felt more constrained, staying very close to the cart (usually I will put my cart at the end of an aisle and walk away from it to pick up items if the store is too crowded…couldn’t do that this time) at all times. I was also annoyed that I couldn’t check off items as I got them, since MM outline mode didn’t allow for that functionality. It really would’ve been better had I just written up the list in Windows Journal, or OneNote, or even in Evernote. Perhaps next time, if I can brave bringing the tablet to the store again!

I sort of had the idea to do this to see if I could just force myself to carry the tablet to places where a UMPC/micro-PC would be more suitable, partially just to see how it’d be, and partially to try and stave off my desire to pick up a UMPC-type device longer…  Can’t justify buying a UMPC if I can just as “easily” use my M200 instead. 🙂 Not sure if I’d do it again, given how big the M200 is (way more obvious than carrying around a PDA), but we’ll see.