I spent most of last year editing on a tablet. Not exclusively, and for the majority of finished work, partly out of curiosity and partly because I was travelling and did not want to carry a laptop.
It worked considerably better than I expected and failed in places I had not anticipated.
What worked immediately
Raw processing power is not the problem people assume. Modern tablet processors handle high resolution footage without difficulty, and the intra-frame codecs that used to require a workstation play back fine.
Touch editing for rough assembly is genuinely faster than a mouse. Dragging a clip with a finger, scrubbing directly on the timeline, pinching to zoom — these map naturally onto what you are doing and after a few weeks going back to a trackpad felt clumsy.
The screen is generally excellent, better than most laptop displays, which matters more than I expected for judging exposure and focus.
And the battery life is transformative. Editing on a train for four hours without thinking about power is a different experience from doing it on a laptop.
What failed
Precision, first and most consistently. Frame-accurate trimming with a finger is difficult because your finger is larger than the thing you are trying to hit.
Every application solves this with zoom and with fine adjustment controls, and both add steps to an operation that should take a moment. Over a long edit this accumulates into real frustration.
A stylus helps considerably and does not fully solve it. A keyboard with proper shortcuts helps more, at which point you are carrying two accessories and the weight advantage is eroding.
File management, second. The way tablet operating systems handle files is designed around applications owning their content, and video editing is inherently about moving large amounts of media between places.
Importing from an external drive, keeping media organised, and backing up mid-project were all more awkward than they needed to be, and this is the thing that would stop me recommending it for anything long.
The application gap is narrower than expected
I assumed the software would be the limitation. Mostly it was not.
The major editing applications now have tablet versions that are genuinely capable rather than cut down. Multi-track timelines, keyframing, colour tools, audio mixing, effects.
What is missing tends to be at the edges. Complex nested sequences. Some plugin ecosystems. Advanced audio work. Anything involving external hardware.
For a straightforward edit — cut, colour, mix, export — the tablet versions do everything the desktop versions do.
Where it was actually better
Reviewing footage. Sitting somewhere comfortable, going through material, marking selects, is much nicer on a tablet than at a desk, and it is a large fraction of editing time.
Doing that on a tablet and then moving to a desktop for the fine cut was the workflow I ended up with and it is one I would keep regardless.
Client review too. Handing someone a tablet with a cut on it is a better experience than turning a laptop around, and the touch scrubbing means they can look at a specific moment without describing it to you.
The thing nobody mentions
Storage. Tablets generally have fixed internal storage and video consumes it instantly.
Working from an external drive is possible and adds the file management friction described above. Working internally means constant management of what is on the device.
I spent more time thinking about storage than about any creative decision for the first two months, and never fully stopped.
If I were doing it again I would buy the largest internal storage available and treat the cost as part of the price of the approach.
Would I recommend it
For short-form work, yes, without much qualification. Pieces under a couple of minutes, few sources, quick turnaround. The tablet is arguably better than a laptop for this.
For medium-length work, yes with a keyboard and a plan for storage.
For anything long, multi-camera, heavily graded, or with complex audio, no. Not because it cannot be done but because you will fight the environment continuously and the fight is not productive.
What the year actually taught me
Less about tablets than about how much of editing is decision-making rather than operation.
The parts that were harder on a tablet were the mechanical parts — trimming precisely, managing files, navigating complex projects. The parts that matter — what to keep, what order, how long — were unaffected.
Which suggests the tooling matters less than the discourse implies, and that the years I spent thinking about hardware were years I could have spent watching my own assemblies more carefully.
The colour question
One thing I got wrong at the start and should flag. I graded several pieces on the tablet, on a screen I had not calibrated, and delivered them.
Two of them were noticeably off when I looked later on a proper monitor — warmer than intended and slightly over-saturated, which is roughly what an uncalibrated consumer display encourages.
Tablet screens are generally set up to look attractive rather than to be accurate, and several of them apply adaptive adjustments based on ambient light, which is precisely what you do not want while grading.
Turning off any adaptive display feature is the minimum. Doing anything final on a display you have measured is the honest answer, and it is one of the few things about the year that I would say is a genuine limitation rather than an inconvenience.