Trying to find good Tablet for College

roar94

Hey all,

I am going into Third year English and Psychology, and recently my laptop went BANG. Considering I've decided to commute to Uni from home, I've decided to invest in a light and portable Tablet instead of another laptop.

I was hoping ye could help me find one reasonably priced (under €300 if possible), that I could browse on the internet, good storage and is compatible with Microsoft Office. And that connects to a keypad? If ye have one or know of someone who has one like this it would be great, 'cause I'm so clueless about what is good!. Thanks in advance

EDIT: I was thinking something along the lines of Samsung Galaxy 3 10.1 inch 16GB Tablet

yoyo

Will you be doing much typing on the device? Writing your thesis, projects etc.? Tablets are not a replacement to a proper desktop or laptop, they ideally compliment them. For basic use (surfing the web, Facebook, light emailing etc.) some may find they suit their needs fine but for advanced work they just don't cut it. The exception being the Microsoft Surface, but this tablet would be over your budget.
If you plan on doing any serious typing/project work on the device I would strongly advise getting a laptop. Newer laptops are fairly slim and light these days in comparison to a few years back.

Nick

GarIT

You say it needs to be compatible with office. There are no tablets that can run office except Microsoft's surface, which you would probably need to double your budget to get. You should consider a netbook. They are usually less than €300 and not much bigger than a large tablet. The Samsung tab you mentioned wont run office.

Overheal

GarIT wrote: »

You say it needs to be compatible with office. There are no tablets that can run office except Microsoft's surface, which you would probably need to double your budget to get.

This is a misnomer, in some ways.

Depending on the level of functionality you require, most primary Office application (eg. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote) is accessible via PC, Mac, Web, WP8, iOS, and Android through various apps.

For a Samsung tablet for instance running Android, you will need to be an Office 365 Subscriber (Student version price is far lower). If you need the more advanced program features (eg. a linear line regression chart in Excel) then you would want to access Excel from a computer, which is presumably available at your institution outside of classroom lecture hours.

Whether you pick samsung or the surface, both have bluetooth and you can pair them to larger external keyboards if you do need to do serious typing. For most things though, I prefer the Surface and Typecover. However, for other day to day functions (games, other apps) the Samsung has the Play Store and thats a far cry better than what Microsoft's Store currently is at this juncture. The surface wins out with better Office use (it's included) and better OneDrive integration for syncing your notes and files from your note-taking device (tablet) and expanding your work at home or on a campus computer.

You say good storage but then mention a 16GB Samsung tablet. Are you actually clear about what your storage needs will in fact be? Take time now to audit how many files you use/require now as a function of your academic program.

Neither the Surface or Samsung will really beat a Surface Pro, and if you can invest the money, it is well worth it as it has both the Pen and full PC operation, so you can run and install whatever full programs you like on it, from Office to Adobe CC to Titanfall. I use my Pro with OneNote 90% of the time the tablet is in use, and frankly when I'm in a classroom next to iPad people who have to download weird apps to switch from pen to eraser with their styluses, and wear frickin' gloves to stop their hand from ruining their writing - they get rather envious about the pen and keyboard, just saying.

roar94

Thanks for all of yer help. I have actually decided to just buy another laptop, at least that will have everything I need, and apparently they are much lighter now than my 4 year old laptop.

tipp2k12

Out of a matter of interest which laptop do you plan on purchasing?