Tablet choice for college

Jimmy Bottlehead

I'm starting a Masters course soon and want to get a tablet instead of carting my 17" laptop in and out.

I'm fairly budget restricted so am preferably looking for something €100 or less. It'll just be used for basic note taking and Microsoft Word, and some browsing & reading for research. From what I've read, about 10" screen (with a keyboard) is recommended for typing.

AliExpress seems to have a few options and I've bought tonnes of stuff off it, but nothing electronic or of big value.

What would you guys recommend?

Jimmy Bottlehead

Jimmy Bottlehead wrote: »

I'm starting a Masters course soon and want to get a tablet instead of carting my 17" laptop in and out.

I'm fairly budget restricted so am preferably looking for something €100 or less. It'll just be used for basic note taking and Microsoft Word, and some browsing & reading for research. From what I've read, about 10" screen (with a keyboard) is recommended for typing.

AliExpress seems to have a few options and I've bought tonnes of stuff off it, but nothing electronic or of big value.

What would you guys recommend?

Slightly outside your budget, but much more functional for the price. Tablets aren't very useful, in reality.

Lenovo N22 11.6-Inch HD Chromebook Laptop (Black) - (Intel Celeron N3060, 2 GB RAM, 32 GB EMMC, Chrome OS) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01GCNZ79C/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_xigYxb7C9PMTG

Tom Dunne

Jimmy Bottlehead wrote: »

From what I've read, about 10" screen (with a keyboard) is recommended for typing.

I would strongly dispute that.

Before you buy, try out the keyboards. Any I have tried are flimsy and really only suited to typing out brief emails. I ended up buying the Microsoft Surface Pro and even the keyboard on that is terribly flimsy (I acknowledge that is way out of your budget, but I am just giving it for comparison).

Jimmy Bottlehead

That Lenovo is a great shout actually, thank you.

A mate of mine recommended the ASUS X205TA: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B015OG3GM8/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1472778208&sr=8-2&pi=SX200_QL40&keywords=asus+x205ta&dpPl=1&dpID=41orMpKHECL&ref=plSrch

I'm already thinking that a notebook or Chromebook is a better choice than a tablet, as mentioned above.

Thoughts on the above notebook compared to the Lenovo, or any other options?

Mantis Toboggan

Afaik Microsoft Word isn't available on chrome os.

Jimmy Bottlehead

Jimmy Bottlehead wrote: »

That Lenovo is a great shout actually, thank you.

A mate of mine recommended the ASUS X205TA: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B015OG3GM8/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1472778208&sr=8-2&pi=SX200_QL40&keywords=asus+x205ta&dpPl=1&dpID=41orMpKHECL&ref=plSrch

I'm already thinking that a notebook or Chromebook is a better choice than a tablet, as mentioned above.

Thoughts on the above notebook compared to the Lenovo, or any other options?

That Asus looks pretty cool, but wouldn't know much about it. It seems to have decent reviews.

Tyson Fury wrote: »

Afaik Microsoft Word isn't available on chrome os.

You can use word, excel etc.

ED E

Basil3 wrote: »

You can use word, excel etc.

You can use the Web versions, not quite the same as the desktop versions. You'd be better served by gDocs and gSheets in that scenario.

Jimmy Bottlehead

Cheers everyone.

Got a great deal on the Asus Vivobook on BT Shop, £30 less than Amazon! Only £150 delivered.

Here's the link for the laptop on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01AWHN1Q0/ref=cm_sw_r_apa_KgFYxbRG74GN4

ED E

Have you received it yet? IMHO that machine will be nothing but pain. Running full blown windows on a 2W processor...

Tom Dunne

ED E wrote: »

Have you received it yet? IMHO that machine will be nothing but pain. Running full blown windows on a 2W processor...

And 2Gb of RAM? Oh dear.

wheresmybeaver

For Word, PowerPoint, simple browsing and reading pdfs and the like it will be absolutely grand. It'll struggle with too many windows open simultaneously so watch out for that.

It's remarkable what you can get for such little money in laptops right now.

ED E

wheresmybeaver wrote: »

For Word, PowerPoint, simple browsing and reading pdfs and the like it will be absolutely grand. It'll struggle with too many windows open simultaneously so watch out for that.

It's remarkable what you can get for such little money in laptops right now.

Have to disagree there.

Family member runs W10 on a Celeron N2830 which is arguably faster (better SCP) and even that has horrendous boot times and is overall a pain to do anything. In this price bracket a good android tablet on ARM is much better than the worst of the X86/desktop OS market.

Jimmy Bottlehead

So far so good anyways. It's not my main work laptop so it really is just for basic word processing, reading papers, college work and the like.

It's also beautifully light, has a whopper battery life, excellent keyboard.