Tablet or i-pad?

kuvvy

kuvvy

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Although I have the i-phone 4 and was considering the new ipad, I have just ordered an Archos android tablet, the one shown here:

http://store.archos.com/archos-p-5017.html

Saw it on the shopping channel and thought it looked pretty good and it's a newly launched model so thought I'd give it a trry on a 30 day return basis.

I'd like to ask;

Is anyone else using an Android tablet device?
How well (or poorly) does it work?
Apart from a difference in the Apps available Apple and Google is there any problems in having owning android tablet and an Apple i-phone?
Though I won't be doing major photo editing on it, what is the best photo editing App for the Android?

The tablet should arrive in the next day or so and I'd like to know in advance of the advantages, disadvantages ot tips you guys may have.

Thanking you in advance

Paul
 
An iPad is a tablet, btw.

The problem with the Android world is that you can't single out one tablet and judge the rest of the non-iPad world: the Android world fragmentation is immense, and it has and still is (and I'm afraid still will be for a long time to come) a victim of its "democratization": different hardware, different implementations, hundreds and hundreds of variants, not to mention Android itself (current OS version is 4, but half of Android devices are running 2.x)

So..."how well (or poorly) does it work?" requires a lot of qualifying.

If you want predictability, stick to Apple's offerings. They may have a very closed/dictatorial platform, but that is definitely a strength: the "who cares!"-ists and the good-enough-ists are kept at bay ruining it for the rest who do care.

That said, I have the ASUS Eee Transformer running AndroidOS 4.x and I'm happy, except that many applications seem to crash now...given the issue I mentioned above: too much fragmentation, most testing has been done only on v3 or v2...and new adopters of v4 are running into some issues.
 
If you care about the freedom to do what you want with your tablet, i.e. install apps not approved by the manufacturer, then Android. If you just want to use a tablet, then iPad all the way.

Bear in mind that Android tablets are not so good, generally at getting OS updates. Every Apple iPad made can be updated to the latest OS, Android is pot luck.

If you want to do photo work, even lightweight, I'd say get neither and get a tablet/small laptop running Windows 7. Or a used Macbook Air can be about the price of a new iPad, and vastly more useful.
 
Thanks for that info and much of what you say makes sense and I've gone over much of it in my thoughts. Perhaps deep down I would prefer the i-pad but was swayed by the presentation (and the price) for the Archos. Never having used either i thought worth a go. I suppose the i-pad is just a larger version of my i-phone anyway and the similarity will help.
 
With the i-pad there are various options that can be confusing. I thought the 32Gb with wi-fi and 4G would be a decent option but the price is £579 ($928), a lot of cash. To be honest I reckon I'd use it musch like i do my i-phone, keeping up with emails, RFF of course and general use. I don't download thing like movies (but will i be tempted to with the i-pad?) so may be 16Gb will suffice.
 
I like that bit in the Archos' ad about experiencing the "true" Internet because it can do flash. My 1st gen iPad won't do flash. I wonder if my daughter's Kindle Fire does? The Fire has an Internet browser too, and seems like a pretty good machine.
 
I though about buying a tablet but having a netbook I could not see the point; there are netbooks that are marginally heavier than tablets, plenty are just marginally thicker. However if you use a digi cam you can get netbooks with a hard drive built in, great for the storage of images, it will do a fair bit more too. I looked at the iPad and others and realised I would only use them to surf the web etc and I do not do much of that when I go away. If you are looking for a devise for travel, consider whether you require some form of storage and what else you require.
 
I bought a Nook Color a couple of weeks ago and I'm glad I did. I got the 8 GB model, "recertified pre-owned" (which, it turned out, is indistinguishable from new) for all of $135 plus tax, shipped in the US, 1 year warranty. I thought about the Kindle but IMO it's a non-starter because you only get cloud storage, no expansion slot.

So far I'm only running the Barnes & Noble stuff which is OK, but I'll definitely try Android. I hear most users don't feel the need to go back to the original OS, except for visits to the B&N store ;)
 
Big fan of the iPad (have the 3rd version). It's perfect for what it is. A great laptop replacement for me.
 
The 3rd gen iPad is really quite an amazing device on which to view photos. Like seeing an 8 x 10 sheet of E6 on a light table. (It's actually closer to 'whole plate') That's an exaggeration, of course, but not by much. And you don't need a loupe to zoom in, just two fingers...
Not ready to replace my MBP for ingest and editing, but BETTER at REVIEW than anything else...
I wonder how many android users are running Linux on their desktops? Not many I suspect...and that tells you exactly where android(s) is (are) heading - especially if Microsoft gets its act together. (Of course, that's a BIG if...)
 
The iPad has just about become my standard computer. I use it for nearly everything that I once felt I needed a laptop for, there are only a few things that I have to use the MBP or MBA for.

Serious image processing from raw capture is one of them. :)

That said, I can happily use the iPad for the lighter duty image work and almost prefer it for that. Using the iPhone 4s as my camera with Mattebox and the iPad 2 with Snapseed, I can do entire photo projects, end to end. It's really quite amazing.
 
My son has a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 that I bought him for Christmas. It cost $450, almost what an iPad cost, but he wanted the Samsung, not the Apple. He's a computer geek and wanted a tablet he could mess around with the OS and software in ways that you cannot with the closed system on the iPads. He loves it, and I have to say I am impressed with it too. Wish I could afford one for me! The display is pretty good, shows the photos on my website very accurately. The new iPad 3 has a lot higher screen res, but it actually makes my images look soft because on my website they're sized at 640 pixels wide, which makes them look very small on the high res screen, so the iPad interpolates them to make the webpage fill the screen and the lack of fine detail in web-size images shows!
 
My iPad 2 has been one of my best investments, per dollar spent. I use it every single day, I read the paper, RFF, rest of the web on it. Check my emails, read my PDF textbooks (medical texts are very large, having an entire library in my iPad is incredibly useful). I can watch YouTube, stream movies from my PC, write drafts of reports etc all on this little device which battery last almost 10hrs even a year after I've got it.

The ease of use, convenience and reliability is a big factor for me. Also given that iOS is much more popular for developers, there are better quality apps as programmers know that they can earn potential big bucks on this platform. I used to surf on my laptop in bed previously, now my laptop is sitting on my table barely used.

I'm not an apple fanboy by any means, in fact I find a lot of problems with their Mac OS vs Win7. But iPad-wise, I think they've got a great product. Only regret is being too cheap to get the 3G version.
 
crispy12 said:
My iPad 2 has been one of my best investments, per dollar spent. I use it every single day, I read the paper, RFF, rest of the web on it. Check my emails, read my PDF textbooks (medical texts are very large, having an entire library in my iPad is incredibly useful). I can watch YouTube, stream movies from my PC, write drafts of reports etc all on this little device which battery last almost 10hrs even a year after I've got it.

The ease of use, convenience and reliability is a big factor for me. Also given that iOS is much more popular for developers, there are better quality apps as programmers know that they can earn potential big bucks on this platform. I used to surf on my laptop in bed previously, now my laptop is sitting on my table barely used.

I'm not an apple fanboy by any means, in fact I find a lot of problems with their Mac OS vs Win7. But iPad-wise, I think they've got a great product. Only regret is being too cheap to get the 3G version.
Click to expand...

I never thought about using textbooks on an iPad. Which ones do you have?
 
I went a different route. I really was after an ereader above all else, so after a lot of research I decided upon the Sony Reader WiFi (PRS-T1) for a mere $100, which in itself is nothing short of awesomeness, by the way.

Then, I got the bright idea to root/hack the device (very simple process that any 10 year-old would be capable of) to transform it into a full-blown tablet computer. Yes, under the hood, the Sony Reader is powered by Android 2.2, so I was able to download Android Market, (now called Google Play Store) which enabled me to download all sorts of terrific, free apps. The home page is completely customizable also. The end result is that I now have a fully functioning Android-powered tablet computer for $100. It does anything/everything a "real" tablet does. I can surf the net, read newspapers from around the world, show the weather forecast on my desktop, use it as a calculator, calendar, go straight to Wikipedia, play games, (I love Sudoku, Chess, Cribbage, Euchre, Blackjack, Solitaire) check my email, (Facebook/Twitter, etc. for those so inclined) store photos/documents, listen to music, and best of all....READ. (I have 4,987 books on my reader!) I even have a terrific app that allows me to save interesting articles to read later offline.

Any drawbacks, you may ask? Well, I suppose there are two aspects of my new "tablet" that someone may consider a negative. First, the e-ink screen is not colour. Of course, anyone who does a lot of reading will immediately understand that this is really a positive, as e-ink is one of the great wonders of the world, when it comes to easy-on-the-eyes viewing. And lastly, it won't play video, so if you are after something to watch You-Tube on, you need to look elsewhere. I love that this is the thinnest, lightest "tablet" available today; it can basically fit in a pocket. The touch screen performs brilliantly.


And there you have it. If you want a REALLY affordable, yet extremely well-made tablet computer, it takes a grand total of about 10 minutes to very easily transform the Sony PRS-T1 into a fully functioning, high quality tablet computer. Where else can one get an excellent, compact, lightweight tablet for a mere $100! And let's not forget that this is considered one of the very best ereaders on the planet!


Glen
 
I have a Samsung Galaxy 7.0 Plus and an iPad 3 (which replaced an original iPad). Apparently the "Honeycomb" version of Android that my Galaxy runs is somewhat notoriously unstable (from what I read), and which I can confirm with experience of app crashing on a fairly frequent basis (even apps that shipped with the tablet, even after a factory reset). App crashes on the iPad are less frequent, it seems to me.

Samsung has not issued an Android update for my tablet to the latest OS, and I'm unsure if they will even do so. The Android market does seem to be balkanized, with a lot of hardware available with a lot of concurrent versions of the OS, and no universal upgrade plan. So buying an Android tablet may very well mean marrying yourself to that explicit tablet and OS version, never to see any updates beyond whatever apps that you buy and that work on your hardware.

I develop games, and most mobile game developers I know prefer developing for iOS, citing testing difficulties with all the various OS/hardware combos out there, as well as the somewhat haphazard implementations of various APIs by each manufacturer. Android apps haven't proven to be as profitable for them as iOS apps, so there seems to be (in this market segment, anyway) some momentum back to iOS.

I wanted to like Android, but it feels overall less polished and less well implemented than iOS. One can say it's because of the more open nature and technical challenges involved, that Apple solves by strictly controlling all the hardware and software, and that it's to be expected that Android would have these issues, but after decades of dealing with computers day in and day out, every day, as my job and my hobby, I say, "Don't care. I want what works more reliably," and my experience leads me back to Apple.
 
Depends what you want to do with the tablet:

If its just to consume media (watch movies, browse the web) you might be able to get away with a tablet.

If you want to do more and create something from a simple document to detailed photo editing (Snapseed is awesome!!!) go for the iPad 2nd or 3rd generation.

With regards to "freedom" of wanting to do what you want. Its just a matter if its your hobby to mess with software rather than using the device for your purpose. Also the restrictions applied by Apple on the developers are there to protect you as the end user. There are plenty to choose from... plenty off freedom there.


You can save $100 by choosing the previous generation iPad (2) witch is still a great device. We have the recent and previous one and love them both. However as much as a Geek that I am I can't justify to exchange my iPad 2 for an iPad 3...

Hope this helps,

Rogier
 
hteasley said:
I have a Samsung Galaxy 7.0 Plus and an iPad 3 (which replaced an original iPad). Apparently the "Honeycomb" version of Android that my Galaxy runs is somewhat notoriously unstable (from what I read), and which I can confirm with experience of app crashing on a fairly frequent basis (even apps that shipped with the tablet, even after a factory reset). App crashes on the iPad are less frequent, it seems to me.

Samsung has not issued an Android update for my tablet to the latest OS, and I'm unsure if they will even do so. The Android market does seem to be balkanized, with a lot of hardware available with a lot of concurrent versions of the OS, and no universal upgrade plan. So buying an Android tablet may very well mean marrying yourself to that explicit tablet and OS version, never to see any updates beyond whatever apps that you buy and that work on your hardware.

I develop games, and most mobile game developers I know prefer developing for iOS, citing testing difficulties with all the various OS/hardware combos out there, as well as the somewhat haphazard implementations of various APIs by each manufacturer. Android apps haven't proven to be as profitable for them as iOS apps, so there seems to be (in this market segment, anyway) some momentum back to iOS.

I wanted to like Android, but it feels overall less polished and less well implemented than iOS. One can say it's because of the more open nature and technical challenges involved, that Apple solves by strictly controlling all the hardware and software, and that it's to be expected that Android would have these issues, but after decades of dealing with computers day in and day out, every day, as my job and my hobby, I say, "Don't care. I want what works more reliably," and my experience leads me back to Apple.
Click to expand...


AMEN BROTHERv:)
 
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