A tablet (note the distinct lack of brand specification), so long as it provides two things, does all it needs to do. It is an 80% replacement for a PC for 100% of what people do:
Email and Web.
I don’t USE it to manipulate files, I don’t USE it to edit video. It does Email and Web…anywhere…easier than a PC or Laptop when you are away from a desk.
Then (in my case) playing back video.
Anything ELSE is does is just gravy.
Now, you want to get religious, Android and Apple will never compete on even ground because they’re orthoginally different. Android is completely totally and always obsessed with specs. More ports, more bytes, more Gips and Mips and pips. Apple shoots more for polish, user experience, and integration with the rest of their ecosystem.
And I don’t ever see that changing. But the important stuff…Web, Email, and media playback, they both do admirably well.
I dook a two week vacation with my Camera, my iPad, and a camera kit. I could do EVERYTHING I wanted to do on vacation. About 10 seconds after I got home, though, I wanted to hook it up, transfer the pics to a ‘Real Computer’, and so some stuff you just couldn’t do as easily on an iPad.
I don’t care if it makes espresso and sliced bread, it is not an “improvement” to take away the plug and play aspect. Not least of which any of the cloud solutions requires and internet connection, and if you get wifi only iPad, then for sure there will be times it is a pain the ass to get only to transfer some file or photo that’s been really easy to do for a decade. There may be some advantages to the cloud based solution, not least of which being the carriers all write big fat checks to Apple, but it’s a step backward to also not have the plug and play.
I just got this and it’s… awesome. The battery life is now like a phone. I plug it in overnight, and then I use it all day the next day. And by all day, I mean all freaking day. I can surf the web, watch movies, do whatever for 12-14 hours before the battery life is gone. That alone is a complete game changer from the laptop I had before. It’s great, because tablets aren’t good for anything but short messages. The attached keyboard makes it so much more useful. The only thing it doesn’t meet is your requirement for Word, but no tablet will do that.
That being said, there are a few problems with it:
(1) The dock/tablet connection isn’t good enough. It’s a shame, because it’s really a spectacular design. They just didn’t make the hooks strong enough, or the connection robust enough. If you use it on your lap, or pick it up and move it around there’s a chance the connection between the tablet and the keyboard will go out. Just using it on a desk or table has been rock solid.
(2) It’s missing apps. Off the top of my head, there is no scrabble or monopoly. I imagine these are coming, but it sucks that they aren’t there now. The iPad appears to have far more apps available. There’s nothing essential you can’t get, though.
(3) There’s no easy way that I’ve found to search for tablet optimized programs. Realistically, there is no reason for phones and tablets to have the same OS. Someone above said tablets aren’t full computers, but that’s bullocks. My EEE Transformer has the same form factor as my old netbook, and should be able to do everything that my netbook could. Anyways, it’s just annoying to have something obviously designed for a phone look like crap on my big tablet screen.
(4) Android isn’t a mature system yet and has bugs. For example, the default music player doesn’t actually sort by artist though it says it does. So for example, if you go to Jackson Browne -> Greatest Hits, it will show all songs in albums with the “Greatest Hits” album title. So if you have The Eagles -> Greatest Hits those will be mixed up. Opera Mobile crashes occasionally, and doesn’t have a smooth back function.
I downloaded some music apps to try and find a better player. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find one that matches the nice interface of the default App. More bizarrely, my default music player appears to be gone. Hitting the music app now launches firefox.
treis, that sucks to hear that the EEE pad is so glitchy. I have read the complaint before that the Android Market doesn’t differentiate what few tablet-specific apps there are. Hopefully this will change with Ice Cream Sandwich, aka Android 4(?), which is supposed to unify the phone and tablet versions into a single code base, a la iOS. This will make optimizing existing phone apps for tablets much easier from what I’ve read.
And I’m watching an .avi on my Mac right now, and regularly convert .avis to .mp4s when I want to watch them on my iPad or iPhone because I don’t have an app for that – yet.
Not at all, you just have to have an app that supports the file type. Just as you wouldn’t try to open an spreadsheet in TextPad on your PC, you can’t open/manage an .avi in iTunes for your iPad. You use Excel for your spreadsheet, you use CineXPlayer for .avi use on your iPad.
My 5yo nephew had surgery last week; the cheap DVD player his father had brought last Christmas had already broken down, so Bro was thinking of getting a tablet. I did some market research for him, he ended up buying one that cost 149€ with an 8.4" screen, with enough memory to stick a couple of movies in. Since “light enough to hand it to the kids” was an important requirement, a tablet made more sense than other portable options. Some of the “tablets” he’d been researching weren’t tablets in my book, having no USB connection :eek:
Viewings of Beauty and the Beast and of Dora episodes have, so far, proceeded satisfactorily.
At least with Apple, they still largely lean on a wired iTunes connection, and less so on the growing cloud-based options (at least for the bulk of their iDevice existence). The file explorer quarrel is separate from the cloud services one.
Besides, if content is cloud-based, it can still be stored locally. Come to think of it, pretty much all of my cloud content can be downloaded and or cached, if necessary. The real advantage, in my eyes, is that I can get the content/information most anywhere, it serves as a backup, and I don’t have to burn my limited storage space.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t experienced any unintentional unlatching of my dock. It is true that Honeycomb is somewhat buggy. Force closes occur with some regularity, though at least some of this seems to be on the app side rather than the OS. I find it pretty much impossible to browse like I do on my desktop with 23 open tabs since every browser I’ve tried will crash with more than 10 or so open. Browser crashes are pretty rare if I restrain myself to a couple tabs, though.
The market app does now have a “featured for tablets” section, and I’ve seen Scrabble in it. But I don’t believe you can do market searches with that as a constraint. Tablet-optimized app selection is still way behind iOS, but there’s more all the time and well-coded phone apps scale nicely - as in, not granulated blurry zoom mode, but nice and crisp. A few are nasty, but that’s what free preview versions are for. And of course there are any number of forums where you can get information on the best app for x, y, or z.
Now, I’m not saying that the iPad is good just because it’s popular, or that another tablet won’t be exactly what you want. What you should keep in mind is that these devices all require custom software to be written for them, and there’s a strong pull from Apple for major developers. I wouldn’t buy a non-iPad tablet and expect to get cool new software (at least not until after it shows up on the iPad).
My brother is a certified geek and a Macintosh snob, I mean enthusiast (I don’t know how to do that strike-through thing here) and insists that Mac products are hugely more intuitive and easier to figure out than anything else.
I’ve got a question about the file system in iOS. This “all files belong to an app” thing. An app? I was just reading some stuff on another forum which suggested that if you wanted to open a file with more than one app you’d need to have it added to iTunes under both apps, and written to your device twice(or more). Surely this is wrong. If I have a slideshow app and a photo editing app and a picture frame widget in iOS, I can use all three to browse through the same photos, right? Or if I have multiple pdf viewers because I like the one for long texts and the other for chart and graphics-heavy documents, etc, I can still open any pdf with any viewer, can’t I?
But assuming that this guy was wrong and my common sense conclusion is right, what does it mean to say all files are owned by apps? And how do you open a file with an app if that file is owned by a different app?
Note to treis: practically flinging this thing about by the screen for the last hour, and no disconnects yet. Wish I could revert this round “pointer” we got in 3.2 back to the conventional arrow, though.
Photos get sucked into the photo app when using iTunes or the Camera kit. Using Pages, you create presentations there, but can browse the photos to add them to a presentation. If you’re in Dropbox, you can select a file and send it to an appropriate application.
I pulled an Excel spreadsheet from Excel, put it on Dropbox, once there, I can view it or send it to Numbers, within Numbers I can share by ‘emailing spreadsheet’, Printing, Sharing via iWork.com, Send to iTunes, copy to iDisk, or copy to a WebDAV share (note a lack of ‘send back to Dropbox’)
“The” photo app? What if you have 8? This is what I’m not understanding - I just haven’t used iOS devices, and my brain is thoroughly entrenched in the file structure that I’ve been accustomed to since, well, since I was using Apple II’s back in grade school.
So if I understood that right, if I download a photo editing app and put it on my iPad, I can’t open that app and just look at the image files on the device? I have to do something to “send” the files to that app?
And if I have SuperPDFView and have my entire library of hand-scanned Road & Track magazines from 1982 loaded on my iPad (including scathing reviews of the Porsche 924 and glowing praise for the most recent Wankel-powered Mazda) I can’t look at those pdfs with AmazingPDFView when I buy it after my friends tell me it’s even more amazing than SuperPDFView? I have to first change those pdfs in iTunes to be assigned to AmazingPDFView? What if I’m not near my computer?
This seems so insane to me that I’m still confident I’m just not getting it.
(You know, it auto-corrected my “phobe” to “phile”)