Tablet computers, what's worth getting?

Recon

I've been looking around a few of the electronics shops in town recently at the different tablet computers available, I was surprised that the iPads are significantly more expensive than some of the other ones, like I find Apple are with laptops.

How do iPads compare to other tablets? Do many people here have tablets? And what ones?

Paulw

I've a Sony Tablet S. I love it. It's an Android tablet.

It feels good in the hand. A nice weight and balance.

The screen is clear with very good colours.

A unique thing, which I love and use a lot, it has an inbuilt remote, for TV and stuff.

ScumLord

Apple products are very well made and well designed and thought out but for me they're too expensive, and quite restricted. Although they do make the discussion easy for you as there's really only one iPad. Whereas with android it's as varied as laptops.

People that use Android stuff seem to like it just as much, plus being Google it's more open. I don't think there are any windows options until windows 8 comes out.

I don't think you'd be sorry which ever way you went it's just a matter of do you want to pay extra for the iPads trendiness.

Recon

I can't see much of a difference between the Sony Tablet S and iPads.

http://www.pixmania.ie/ie/uk/11250287/art/sony/s-tablet-pc-16gb.html

And with the meteor goodie bag thing the 16GB iPad is coming in at just under €470.

I'll have to call into a few more places to give them a look I think.

Overheal

Recon wrote: »

I was surprised that the iPads are significantly more expensive than some of the other ones, like I find Apple are with laptops.

Well you wouldn't have known it yourself, but they were all priced identically to the iPad earlier in the year. You know, back when they still had their testicles, and the balls to claim they were "The iPad killers".

Throw in a few quarterly loss reports though and the companies start changing their tunes right quick. Which is why the Blackberry playbook is dead, the Touchpad is dead, the Kindle Fire despite its claims is NOT the second coming of christ*, and every other tablet that has escaped discontinuation has seen it's price drop in some cases as much as $130 off the original $600 MSRP price for some 32GB tablets.

It's not that iPads are physically superior to the other tablets, but when they price themselves the same, customers always gravitate to the iPad. For the iPads competitors it was a clear case of Cut or Run.

As for the restricted argument on iPad I typically find it barely holds water for most consumers. Now granted you can't install gameboy emulators on it or anything but it's not as if the iPad is short of a pretty huge library of available, powerful apps. One advantage to the "Restriction" (Apple's App approval system) is that any app you see, you can install, and will be compatible with your tablet, and is not going to infect your system. The Android market hasn't really set that up for itself yet. Sure you can find gameboy games in there but you can also find malicious software, plus see and install things which aren't really a good fit for your device. Only the Sony tablet and one or two others actually filter your market results to only Sony-compatible apps, which is smart.

*I laugh that people called it the iPad Killer. a $200 7" eReader tablet is not going to kill iPad. It will however, god willing, make a lot of these other piece of **** $200 eReader/Tablets from offshoot thirdworld companies disappear. In the $200 weight class, it has no real competition, at least until we see how the Nook Tablet pans out.

Khannie

Overheal wrote: »

One advantage to the "Restriction" (Apple's App approval system) is that any app you see, you can install, and will be compatible with your tablet, and is not going to infect your system. The Android market hasn't really set that up for itself yet. Sure you can find gameboy games in there but you can also find malicious software, plus see and install things which aren't really a good fit for your device. Only the Sony tablet and one or two others actually filter your market results to only Sony-compatible apps, which is smart.

This is the second time I've heard this argument, only there is more nonsense in with it the second time around. The android marketplace is not laden with malicious software what will "infect your system" or anything even vaguely approaching it. When you install software from the marketplace you're warned about what it wants access to on your device (this is based on the API calls that it makes). They also only display software that will run on your device. Sure, some of it may not be a great fit but that's rare and the same applies to older apple devices.

In general I think there's really good value to be had with android tablets now (where there wasn't say, 6 months ago) compared to the equivalent apple offerings. The advantages of not being tied to iTunes are many and varied also IMO. I was well glad to see the back of it.

Overheal

Apple isn't really tied to iTunes though. At worst, if I want to download a movie online I have to drag it from my downloads folder onto the iPod icon in the iTunes program to put it on my iPod.

That and with iOS5 you can pretty much go without ever needing to plug it into a PC again. It's fun pushing updates from a pizza parlor's wifi.

imitation

I think tablets are fundamentally overpriced for what they are, initially I thought they were useless, but I do think now there is a lot of value in a small portable computer you can carry around the house to browse the net at your leisure.

The pricing is all wrong though, naturally they are expensive now as they are new products, but when you consider a laptop/desktop can be brought for less and provide far more functionality. You are paying more for a device that provide only a portion of the ability but allows you to do it around the hous.

The ipad 2 defintely does many things right, the smooth interface, good build quality and battery life. It has one fatal flaw for me though, no flash, it just seems madness to buy something you will mainly use to browse the web that cannot look at a massive amount of the content. I think apple will have to rethink this as cheaper tablets start to cut into there market.