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Informal Survey


Mike Steele

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I'm interested to hear the verdict here, I've heard even the honeycomb Android tablets are pretty average.

 

I've been doing a bit of research lately because I've been advised a tablet is a very good investment for my new career path primarily as a news consumption device.

 

Playing with my iPhone I can see how an iPad would be decent (if somewhat expensive and reliant on the painful iTunes and apple's whole attitude) and a lot of apps, in particular commercial ones are out for it and work better than android at the moment.

 

The Asus tablets are intriguing as tablet-netbook hybrids, big problem is virtually none of the Android tablets have 3G which is a big deal here.

 

I'm hoping someone will show us the greatest Android tablet we've never heard of but I'm not hopeful there is a viable alternative to the Temple of Jobs... :(

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My wife has an iPad. It's neat. I'm still not sure what it's for though.

 

I had pretty much eliminated the iPad early on, if only because I refuse to be a fanboi (or anything like.) No what I'm looking for is something to take the place of a netbook/laptop. The candidate are: Android, Blackberry, and Nook and Fire. Basically it unit has to surf the Net, do email, display MS docuements( word excel PP )(edit them is a +) and any movies etc are a plus. All of the stated things will do that. BB current is short the mail app, but it can be tethered to my phone so that meets the requirement, but not stand-alone like I wish. All the others do.

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I'm waiting for a proper Windows tablet. Then I will get one.

Those are already on the market. Saw a demo of one on the Sharepoint & Exchange Forum in Stockholm earlier this week. The neat thing is that it ran a standard Win7 and not a scaled down OS.

 

I don't remember which producer it was though.

 

/R

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Those are already on the market. Saw a demo of one on the Sharepoint & Exchange Forum in Stockholm earlier this week. The neat thing is that it ran a standard Win7 and not a scaled down OS.

 

I don't remember which producer it was though.

 

/R

 

Lets get hopping on it then! :)

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I had pretty much eliminated the iPad early on, if only because I refuse to be a fanboi (or anything like.)

Fanboi or not, I absolutely love my iPhone. I never thought I would get one, but the Blackberry issues made my Storm 2 too much of a pain to use.

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I had pretty much eliminated the iPad early on, if only because I refuse to be a fanboi (or anything like.) No what I'm looking for is something to take the place of a netbook/laptop. The candidate are: Android, Blackberry, and Nook and Fire. Basically it unit has to surf the Net, do email, display MS docuements( word excel PP )(edit them is a +) and any movies etc are a plus. All of the stated things will do that. BB current is short the mail app, but it can be tethered to my phone so that meets the requirement, but not stand-alone like I wish. All the others do.

 

If you want to be writing stuff forget about tablets.

About the only exception would be the Asus transformer and slider, the latter with a plug in folding laptop keyboard so it is basically an android, touch screen netbook and the former which has a slide out keyboard that adopts a laptop style posture.

 

Or you could shell out whatever ridiculous price crApple is charging for their keyboard dock, but that isn't really portable.

 

Tablets are consumption devices - browsing websites, reading all the various magazines and newspapers with specific apps (some like the economist and foreign policy magazine have excellent apps) watching movies etc - think of them as Super-Duper-Kindle's.

 

Anything more and you're still looking at netbooks or greater.

 

As for becoming a fanboi, well I've got an iPhone4 and while I like it (a lot) I'm certainly no fanboi and regularly curse at it and crApple's infinite retardation. :D

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I have come to the conclusion that I simply do not belong to the target group for these things. I spend enough time on the internet in my home office already with a decent gaming PC, why would I want to settle for less. I will never be so dependent on the internet that I'd have to take this stuff with me while traveling. For presenting my work, I need to drag along a fairly powerful notebook anyway.

 

 

 

Besides, I absolutely loathe fingerprints on the screen.

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Those are already on the market. Saw a demo of one on the Sharepoint & Exchange Forum in Stockholm earlier this week. The neat thing is that it ran a standard Win7 and not a scaled down OS.

 

I don't remember which producer it was though.

 

/R

 

I said "proper" which means one with a proper tablet Windows, which is Windows 8. :)

 

I got a smartphone about 2 years later than I could have because I was waiting for Windows Phone 7. No rush for me to get a tablet either, I'll wait till Win 8 tablets become mainstream.

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In reference to m1a1mg's comment, a friend who is a data center guy for a bank recently got an iPad 2. Whil enduring his Xmas-style gushing, I grilled him on why he bought it. Two reasons were "keeping up with the Joneses", and having a distractor during the interminable staff meetings at work. He uses the hell out of it for work, for example checking the servers while he's at lunch, but the "killer app" aspect of it was battery life and portability. Everything he uses it for could be done with a netbook or laptop. Keep in mind this is a guy who can easily afford to buy all the $40 official Apple data cables ever made without blinking.

 

---

 

I'm very interested in tablets, for personal use, with the following caveats;

 

- must hit my price point (was $500, now $300)

- must excel at the tasks I envision it doing; PIM, web surfing, note taking (w/ external keyboard), maps & directions, Skyping or other VOIP

- must be a 10 incher, the 7s are too small both in display and the "touchboard"

- must have very long battery life, 8+ hours

- must have USB2, though I probably won't buy until they have USB3 (yes, I know there are power & heat issues; HW guys need to man the F up)

- must have a Skype app* or equivalent

- must have an affordable data plan

- must have at least 1280x800 resolution

 

- want the ability to safely jailbreak the OS, in case I want to fart around with different OSes (I'm queasy about a box on which I can't have a dual-boot or hypervisor config)

- want something rugged (though a low enough price point resolves that issue, as would a thin but impact-tolerant sleeve)

- want something that diffentiates me from the latte-sipping conformist fellow traveller crowd

- want a base OS that gives me control and customizability

 

Notice that my needs and wants are contradictory; consumer appliance pricing, high performance, and full customizability. Probably not gonna happen.

 

 

* Now that Skype has been bought out, along with the financial aspect I will wait for the VOIP landscape to reconverge before shopping...

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I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy tab, the 8.9 inch model with 16GB storage and 3G, mostly to replace my old laptop for wifey's couch surfing needs. It's pretty nice. Limited, but nice. Some thoughts:

  • The form factor is the best of any tablet device I've seen, hands down. That includes both gen Ipads, the larger and smaller Galaxy tabs and Motorola Xoom. Light, thin, solid and handy to wield in the car, in buses etc. The display is still big and hi-res enough for just about everything.
  • It feels a bit underpowered, for example enabling the dynamic wallpaper is enough to slow it down. Sometimes web browsers can get slightly stuck when surfing lots of cluttered pages. Some more RAM and CPU speed would be nice.
  • The 3G works great, even with the slowest available data plan. It seems to handle even pretty patchy 3G coverage quite gracefully.
  • The stock browser is not that great. Opera Mobile is quite solid OTOH.
  • Skype started to offer video phone calls for Android just some weeks ago and they seem to work OK too.
  • I wish it could connect to my network HDD (storing all my photos and music) natively, but unfortunately it seems to need a third party file manager for that.

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I'm interested in a surfing/reading device bigger than this iPhone, yet smaller than a laptop. I recently downloaded some books (thanks again, you-know-who ;) ), and my laptop is kinda awkward for simple reading. Even though I can easily read this iPhone, the tiny screen is not the most comfortable reading surface. I'm considering a Droid phone for its larger screen; a tablet the size of a paperback would be interesting, since it could still fit in a pocket.

Edited by shep854
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