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I'm looking to go as digital as possible with 40K. Not having to lug around codexes and having all supplements etc not in a binder would be great.


A plus would be being able to put Army Builder, or at least something like Excel on it to make lists on the fly.


Any recommendations? I don't need to stream videos, take pics, phone people or listen to music, so I don't need something with all the bells and whistles.

Thanks for any advice.

Aye there's PDFs out there or ebooks that you can get from the black library.

If you have Army Builder on your laptop/PC you can just print your rosters to pdf and email them to myself ahead of the game. As long as you have a wifi connection you're usually fine.

If it's android you can put your ebooks/etc onto the google drive and have them on any device.

Then you just have to watch out for power loss and beer spillages.

Does save a lot of weight having them all on 1 device.

Did forget my tablet once though and had to try and use my phone to read my rosters That wasn't fun.

Can't remember the free app that you can download that works on the tables, my mate uses that one. But I still prefer army builder.

As much as hate recommending Apple, the iBook versions of the digital codices are significantly more user friendly than the .epub files you get for other devices. The .epub files are plagued with formatting issues, which can be fixed with a bit of time and effort by editing the files (the one good thing is that there is no DRM on the .epub files) but its still a hassle. And even then you don't get all the handy pop-up links the iBooks versions have for chasing down rules. Having said that though, it's not like the .epub files are unusable or anything.

Battlescribe is the best of the Army Building software imo, and it has apps for Apple, Android and Windows devices.

As for your particular device, iPads are obviously pretty standard and with Android devices the Samsung Galaxy tablets seem pretty good to me. Never used a Windows tablet. I'd recommend going down to a electronics store, and having a play around with some different tablets in your price range.

I'm in the same boat.
I am thinking the Amazon Fire. The 6" one is $99. And using the ebook format. Cheaper.

I would second the iPad versions of codex and rules. Nice thing about the iPad version is all of the "links" if there is a special rule or weapon profile it is a "link" in the iBook. just tap it and all of the information comes right up in context. No need to go to a book mark of change pages. One thing I don't like is if I need to open the rule book and then open something in the codex or vice versa. The switching kind of sucks because the entire volume has to be loaded and you can have 2 open at one time so switching is painfully slow. That being said because of the in context "links" you don't need to do that a whole lot.

I would also second the vote for Battlescribe. I use it on my phone (but could use it on the iPad too) and it works well. Quick on the fly lists. Just used it the other day to quick put together a tournament list. I was going for open gaming to find out the store was running a tournament. Quick threw together a list on Battle scribe and good to go.

Obviously iPads are more expensive, but they are a nice device that can be leveraged for a lot of other things. When at home a rarly use the desktop or Laptop computer for anything just use the iPad instead.

I love the linked rules in the ipad versions of the codex.

I do hate when GW fails them though.

The Glossary for "Skitarii Vehicle Equipment" says a cognis Manipulator has:
Melee
Dataspike
Haywire
Specialist Weapon

Which is the statline they have accidentally copy pasted from the Prehensile Dataspike

The (correct) Glossary for the Manipulator itself says it has:
Melee
Field Repairs
Specialist Weapon
Unwieldy

ArmyBuilder has DropBox support for tablets and phones to automagically snag your lists. Handy if you already have the license. Otherwise BattleScribe works.

I have not used the Apple versions myself, having an Android phone and tablet, but this is what I hear...

Apple versions of the codex and rulebooks look to be far better option than epub or pdf. They cost more, though.
They should work on any iPad from the past 3 years or so, but check that.
The iBook versions have pop-up text, are easier to scroll and search through, and I hear they have army-builder tools, too.

The Apple app is Quartermaster, and the free PC and Android version is Battlescribe.

 Skinnereal wrote:
and I hear they have army-builder tools, too.

No one should be tricked into thinking that the "Force Requisition" part of the iPad Codex is anything like Battlescribe.

It's a poor attempt to allow you to manage models you own. It's not useful for anything.
The rest of the codex is good in the ipad though.

Throw my hat in for Ipad too. I have mostly epub versions of the books, they work well enough. Battlescribe works well on the ipad and is useful for building your lists.

 Purifier wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
and I hear they have army-builder tools, too.

No one should be tricked into thinking that the "Force Requisition" part of the iPad Codex is anything like Battlescribe.

Yeah it is pretty weak. Sad thing is, it would not take a whole lot of effort to make it at least serviceable. i am not a computer genius, but I know it would not take much coding to get it done so i would not have to buy Battlescribe, but i think I can swallow the $5 cost of BattleScribe.

Battlescribe is free, unless you want to pay to get rid of ads? I mean there's a couple of extra features, but the basic version has everything you need to create lists if you can handle some advertising.

Redacted

 GoonBandito wrote:
Battlescribe is free, unless you want to pay to get rid of ads? I mean there's a couple of extra features, but the basic version has everything you need to create lists if you can handle some advertising.

Battlescribe is free, but hosting sites costs them money, and if the hosts went down, there're no new versions.
So, pressing the 'Buy me a beer' button in the older version was worth the effort for me.

Well, crapola. I might have to go Ipad. I was hoping to go with the cheaper option. Both the device and GW publications.

I do have to say the Ipad is a rock solid buy. Bought my wife one over fire years ago. Still works like a champ.

I've got an android tab.

epub? - ereader that even does .mobi

Syncing pdfs to an ipad is a pain and a half. You NEED to use a third party hosting agent and dump to it, then download to the tab. The android drag n' drop is far superior.

As for army stuff. I've got excel on it. It works, and I've synced it to my google drive. I've even used it for tournament scoring.

 chromedog wrote:
I've got an android tab.

epub? - ereader that even does .mobi

Syncing pdfs to an ipad is a pain and a half. You NEED to use a third party hosting agent and dump to it, then download to the tab. The android drag n' drop is far superior.

As for army stuff. I've got excel on it. It works, and I've synced it to my google drive. I've even used it for tournament scoring.

I literally drag and drop PDF format files to my ipad every day - its easy

I bought iPad at Christmas and i so love it.
Other people have already mentioned crossed linked rules and other things.

I have used android before and they are ok, its just that iPad does it better.

I use it for armybuidling (battlescribe, bought to support the devs) and to have (almost) all my armybooks, rules ect.
It gets easier to carry around

If you tend to run out of power, buy a powerpack and you are set !

 GoonBandito wrote:
As much as hate recommending Apple, the iBook versions of the digital codices are significantly more user friendly than the .epub files you get for other devices. The .epub files are plagued with formatting issues, which can be fixed with a bit of time and effort by editing the files (the one good thing is that there is no DRM on the .epub files) but its still a hassle. And even then you don't get all the handy pop-up links the iBooks versions have for chasing down rules. Having said that though, it's not like the .epub files are unusable or anything.

Battlescribe is the best of the Army Building software imo, and it has apps for Apple, Android and Windows devices.

As for your particular device, iPads are obviously pretty standard and with Android devices the Samsung Galaxy tablets seem pretty good to me. Never used a Windows tablet. I'd recommend going down to a electronics store, and having a play around with some different tablets in your price range.

Sadly, I have to agree. The epub and mobi versions are horribly inferior to the iPad and printed versions, IMO.

On the other hand, I don't buy the iPad ebooks, because they're not viewable on PC, and I use Excel on a Surface Pro 3 (not the silly iPad version) for my gaming. All my lists are on it. I absolutely love my SP3. The Surface 3 is also a worthy tablet, for a lot less (iPad-ish prices). I own 2 iPads, but my preference for gaming is strongly SP3. The kickstand makes it much more usable for me too, especially in the "slightly raised" position.

Battlescribe is excellent!

Resurrecting my old thread.....

3 years later, I am playing a lot more and now really feel the need for the tablet.

I'm saying no to Ipads.

So would an Amazon Fire do the trick? Is the screen large enough? ( I'm ow using reading glasses for books, would love to have the old person larger text option lol).

Just need to put Battlescribe and my codexes/rulebooks on it.

Thanks for opinions!

I have several different tablets and laptops, from a macbook, windows laptop, 2 in 1 chromebook, ipad, 2 android tablets, and an amazon fire.

I don't like saying this because i prefer android in general for tablet and OSx for laptop use, but hands down the best for reading rulebooks is the ipad by a bazillion miles. The experience is the smoothest, it feels the best and most intuitive, the reading is native. Android has all sorts of PDF readers, i've tried dozens, and all of them are sadly trash. My ipad is one of my oldest devices, it's an ancient ipad 4, and i literally only keep it around to read 40k and rpg books on because it works better for that than any of my new devices that have 3 times the processing power. It simply works, doesn't crash, is very easy to read on, zoom in and out with no lag.

you will regret anything else because it'll load blocky, missing text, lag when trying to scroll around, zoom in on text, or flip pages. It'll crash because for some wild reason PDFs are a pain to render.


get an ipad.

*I don't even get the special "ipad version' of the codecies, i just get the standard PDF ones, and they still render so much smoother on my ipad than any of my other devices.

I have an Asus Android tablet; I had an iPad until I discovered it was trying to commit suicide by filling up its own hard drive with redundant backups to force me to get a new one. I've had no trouble with the system pdf reader.

Laptops are fine if you have enough space near the table, and Chromebooks are fine if you have a constant wifi connection, but I tend to prefer the tablet.

I use Amazon Fire HD8, sometimes they are on sale for dirt cheap. Battlescribe runs when Google Playstore is added via hack (super easy).

Big advantage is the battery runtime, which is easily around 12 hours or so and several weeks on standby, so you dont need to put it on a charger in the middle of a tournament day.

Stay away from cheap chinese windows tablets, some have battery runtimes as short as 30 minutes.

unruler wrote:
I use Amazon Fire HD8, sometimes they are on sale for dirt cheap. Battlescribe runs when Google Playstore is added via hack (super easy).

Big advantage is the battery runtime, which is easily around 12 hours or so and several weeks on standby, so you dont need to put it on a charger in the middle of a tournament day.

Stay away from cheap chinese windows tablets, some have battery runtimes as short as 30 minutes.

I was about to pull the trigger on a Fire HD8 but there were a ton of negative reviews......

I cant complain, i have all codices, faqs and my army lists with me aat. But its really all that its good for, if you want to use it for interwebs or games, you have to put more cash on the table.

unruler wrote:
I cant complain, i have all codices, faqs and my army lists with me aat. But its really all that its good for, if you want to use it for interwebs or games, you have to put more cash on the table.

Where did you find the info for putting Battlescribe on it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcU-Q5Rvyn8

Use hack to install google play, use google play to install battlescribe, bäm!

€dit: you may want a gen 7, gen 8 is weird apparently.