I need a device for mobile use with a larger screen than on my Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini mobile phone. What would be the advantages/disadvantages in buying a tablet with 4G capability compared to buying a tablet with WIFI capability and hotspoting it to my mobile phone? My use of the table would be for emails and accessing the internet.

mack77 - 2021-02-24 23:51:00

Hotspotting will flatten the phone battery faster.
But if you buy a 4G tablet then you're either going to have to provide a new sim card, and connection, (money per month etc), just for that or else swap the sim card from the phone to the tablet a lot and that's not ideal. It can damage the sim card holder for one thing and another is that the sim probably will be a different size, (micro as opposed to nano probably), to that which the tablet will take.

So advantage is the tablet will be independently capable of connecting to the net.

Disadvantage, cost, and sim issues.

Edited by nice_lady at 7:53 am, Thu 25 Feb

nice_lady - 2021-02-25 07:52:00

I guess you would have to carry around two computers rather than just one. Can you use a tablet as a cellphone for phonecalls?

Do you currently have a tablet which you can use, or do you need to buy one.

Can you get some stronger glasses, if is that your eyesight makes it difficult to use the cellphone for the emails and the internet.

Maybe you can get an extra big cellphone?

tygertung - 2021-02-25 08:15:00

The phone is quite old, have you looked at newer larger ones, ie the note ?
https://www.samsung.com/nz/smartphones/galaxy-note/

bitsnpieces2020 - 2021-02-25 20:42:00

Thanks for the advice and comments by all of the three people above. As a result of those comments I think that I will buy a tablet and hotspot it to my mobile phone. I have decided to not consider buying a larger phone as I would like to get more content onto the screen.

mack77 - 2021-02-26 23:37:00

BTW, if you're with 2 Degrees, you can have as much as 5 SIM cards sharing the same data allowance, so, if you buy a LTE capable tablet, you can use your data plan without paying extra, and if it's a Samsung tablet you can even use it for phone calls and text messages, this is what I'm doing at the moment with my Galaxy S7 LTE, I even set my main SIM card to forward the phone calls if not answered on my mobile to the tablet, hence I can sometimes leave my mobile at home without worrying about missing a phone call!

flower_tears - 2021-02-27 07:37:00