IPad or Galaxy note tablet or Chart plotter

[maby]

Not in my experience; actual 18 months of using it type experience; not discussing it on a forum type experience.

Obviously, I must defer to your first hand experience, but I must also express surprise if you really have found that an iPad or Android tablet has a life expectancy of upwards of two years, regularly exposed to rain and strong sun with waves breaking over it from time to time. My tablet seldom leaves my living room, but I'm not particularly optimistic about it still working two years from now.

 

[grumpy_o_g]

Not in my experience; actual 18 months of using it type experience; not discussing it on a forum type experience.

My experience of the reliability of tablets is based on seeing them fail regularly in a fairly benign work environment, never mind at sea. I can understand that a Colvic Watson 35 is fairly dry and stable environment but a tablet in the cockpit of a typical 20-35' MAB/AWB with an aft cockpit and nowhere to keep the thing secure is not going to have a long life. Yes, you can get a waterproof cover and a mount but you've then got the limitations of a plotter in a device which doesn't have the full capability of a plotter/MFD. On the right boat and in the right circumstances a tablet can function as a plotter without any problems but it has limitations, including sunlight viewing and ability to receive inputs and display them as well as reliability (based on a very large sample of thousands). That's you can buy ruggedised tablets/devices at a premium and why corporations are willing to pay for them.

 

[Rivers & creeks]

Obviously, I must defer to your first hand experience, but I must also express surprise if you really have found that an iPad or Android tablet has a life expectancy of upwards of two years, regularly exposed to rain and strong sun with waves breaking over it from time to time. My tablet seldom leaves my living room, but I'm not particularly optimistic about it still working two years from now.

Note yacht on which the experience is based - strong winds and waves are excluded from our wheelhouse - the children would complain if I let anything so uncouth in. They've probably left their phones on the wheelhouse sofa - now that gives me an idea :

On the right boat and in the right circumstances a tablet can function as a plotter without any problems

That's all I claimed. And it's an iPad so based on the numbers we have at work where none so far have been returned I'm happy to trust it. Any plotter is surely only a helpful backup to paper charts? In the right boat the iPad does that very well. Personally I reckon in a rugged waterproof case it would be reliable in the cockpit but I have no experience of that.

 

[grumpy_o_g]

That's all I claimed. And it's an iPad so based on the numbers we have at work where none so far have been returned I'm happy to trust it. Any plotter is surely only a helpful backup to paper charts? In the right boat the iPad does that very well. Personally I reckon in a rugged waterproof case it would be reliable in the cockpit but I have no experience of that.

Can't argue with that. I'm intrigued you've not had any iPad's returned. We had about 10% returned within a year for everything from breakages to software faults, which is not dissimilar to the laptop rate. We obviously have a ham-fisted bunch.

 

[maby]

Note yacht on which the experience is based - strong winds and waves are excluded from our wheelhouse - the children would complain if I let anything so uncouth in. They've probably left their phones on the wheelhouse sofa - now that gives me an idea :

...

Ah, but then my original post was not incompatible with your experience - I did observe that the suitability of a tablet is very dependent on your style of sailing. We sail a standard open-cockpit yacht and do go out in bad weather which regularly results in the chart plotter getting soaked with rain, sometimes snow, often getting baked in strong sun for hours and sometimes lashed by waves. No standard tablet in the shops would withstand those conditions for an hour, let alone two years. I guess you could try putting it into a waterproof case, but I suspect that that would seriously impact on useability. The battery life of most tablets with the GPS on and screen brightness turned up seems to be a small number of hours, so for serious passages you would need to get a charging cable in which makes waterproofing more difficult and the whole setup more delicate.

For most people these days, I think the reality is that the paper charts are the backup to the plotter. When we are on a passage, the paper charts are on the chart table and our progress is clearly marked to permit a fall-back to paper in the event of a plotter failure, but I would not chose a plotter solution that is likely to fail simply because "it is a backup to the paper charts" - having my plotter go down is a significant issue that I would try to avoid.