My wife wants a tablet computer - it pretty much has to be a tablet, because she wants something that is fairly easy to use, and is available pretty much instantly.
Yesterday, we looked at iPads and the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Note offerings.
In terms of web browsing, email, apps, etc, I don’t believe there’s a lot of difference to an otherwise uncommitted user - The new iPad screen is quite pretty, but not so much as to make competing offerings horrible.
The thing that’s going to make the difference is photo storage - she takes a lot of photos on her (14MP) digital camera and will want to be able to browse them and show them to people, in places where a network connection is not available.
So… We start with digital images on an SD card and want a large (probably online) gallery of them accessible on a tablet device, with the option to cache a selection of them locally, for offline viewing.
I don’t mind being the part of the loop that moves the files, once, from the SD card to the gallery.
Does iCloud do that? (the local cache option thing).
Is there an offering for Android platforms that does this?
Beware that PC support for iCloud is spotty at best. I have it set up so that pics taken with my iPhone are automatically pushed to the cloud so I could access them from my (Windows-based) computer. It worked great for a while, then just stopped. The pics get to the cloud, but hell if I can get iCloud on my PC to access them.
The support forums are full of people complaining about the same thing, so I’m not alone.
If your wife really needs something like this, I wouldn’t count on it working as described. It’s just buggy.
You can also get the iPad camera connection kit and import the pictures directly from the SD card, without even using a computer in the middle. However, album creation/management on the iPad is not possible, AFAIK. Android tablets will usually have the advantage of having an SD card slot built in, but I’m also not sure how you would manage the pictures on such a device.
On my Android phone, there’s a few file browser apps you can use to organize the folders however you want. I’m not clear on what exactly it is you need beyond that. Dropbox? You can “star” certain files and make them available for offline viewing, or even simply natively “download” them to your internal tablet’s memory.
I can do it on both my Android and my iPad, but I feel you get a greater versatility with the Android.
iPad will be easiest to use, Android will be most flexible but more complex.
If things like not being able to freely drag and drop files to/from the device through Windows Explorer bother you, you might want to stick with Android.
It may be simpler to put resized copies of ALL photos onto an SD card. A 64GB micro-SD card costs less than $70 and most Android tablets can read them. That’s enough for 64,000 high-quality (1MB / image) images.
If you decide to go with a cloud solution, Android tablets work well with Picasa web albums - the built-in Gallery app accesses and shows your Picasa online albums as a default, and if you install the Google+ app, it can be set up to upload all photos taken by the tablet to Picasa. I don’t think there’s a built-in capability to “cache” an album for offline access, but it appears the paid version of Perfect Tools for Picasa has that capability.
p.s. If you liked the iPad3 screen but prefer Android, I’d recommend the ASUS TF700 which has a 1920x1200 IPS+ screen. It’s not quote as high a resolution as the iPad3, but pretty close. And a bit brighter.
You can also get a keyboard dock for it, which has a full-size SD card slot. And uploading photos from an SD card to Picasa web album consists of two steps:
Insert SD card.
Make sure you have wifi connection, and wait.
That’s it, assuming you have the Google+ app configured to upload photos (which is the default setting). All photos in the SD card get uploaded.
Google Play has apps for Picasa and Flixster. Most Android tablets can support micro SD cards up to 32GB.
What I tell people when they are looking for a tablet is that 99% of what you want to do can be accomplished on an Android tablet or an iPad. There is actually very little that one can do that the other can’t. You just need to play with them and decide which OS you like better. FWIW, I have an Asus Transformer Pad TF300 and love it.
You can’t create an album in iPhoto, but I believe albums can be created when you import them from your computer via iTunes or in iPhoto on a Mac. I’m not entirely sure why it doesn’t let you create albums on the iPad itself, seems rather odd.
Technically, that’s a good solution for the slideshow aspects, but that would mean me managing the batch resizing of all the photos and storage/archiving of the full size versions - I really wants something that does it all in one, as seamlessly as possible.
There will be quite a few new tablets and convertibles on the market in 11 days when Windows 8 is launched. Not sure if they will have an SD slot but will definitely have USB connections. Does your wife want to actually type and do some work on the tablet or only use it as a consumption device (show off photos, web browsing, check email, etc)? If the former, should definitely check out some of the Windows 8 devices.
There are tons of journalists that have taken back what they’ve said about touch-screen tablets being merely consumption devices (mainly the iPad, but it applies to android tablets too) after giving themselves a month or two of actually trying to do content creation (read: their job) with only a tablet. I don’t understand why people still think that tablets without keyboards are incapable of doing real work, and should only be used for looking at pictures or text.
This is definitely a media consumption customer. Responding to emails will be about the only typing done on it. However, it will also be her only computer device.
Can you link to some articles written by journalists describing how they use the tablets for their work?
I’ve owned several tablets and I still think it’s mainly a media consumption device. Except the ASUS Transformer series when used with the keyboard dock; these are great for taking notes.
Dropbox will do just fine for that and they recently doubled their storage on paid accounts.
It will be best if transfers via dropbox are limited to being in a wireless network to avoid massive data plan usage (something to watch with icloud too)
I am a huge fan of Android based systems, some of the win8 tablets should be very interesting to see as well. I tend to avoid Apple unless you are an all apple environment…sometimes shit just goes off the rails for no good reason, and they pretty much don’t care..