I was in the "Whadda I need a tablet/smartphone for?" camp for a long time.

Then I got a cheap tablet and a friend gave me his old iPhone.

Now I know what I was missing.

This is Texas so it wouldn't do much good to check weather 48 hours in advance. I check before every ride. Takes a few seconds. Apps on a tablet or smartphone are really fast, much quicker and more efficient than checking my desktop or laptop PCs.

And the weather apps automagically push alerts for my region. I don't need to configure anything, other than a toggle switch to push alerts or not.

You can buy a really good Amazon Kindle Fire for about $40 right now. It's just an Android tablet with Amazon's skin to favor their walled garden approach (a good thing for many folks who aren't tech savvy, like my mom). Runs many useful Amazon-approved apps quickly, and the tablets can run pretty much any Android app with a fairly easy workaround.

Regarding the smartphone, I don't even have a data plan for my older iPhone. I just use it to run cycling apps, maps, snap pix and videos when I don't want to carry my full camera kit or a separate P&S camera.

But I didn't realize how useful these silly things were until I tried 'em.