How many of you will consider an Android Tablet?

[Kidtachyon]

I played with my brother's Galaxy tab and thought it was pretty neat.

Then I went out and bought my ipad!

 

[xune]

Apple faithful here. iPad for me!

 

[spgary]

Not so soon. I will not go for anything smaller than 10 inch but will be lookout of something more lighter. I am sure we will get to see great products from iPad itself and from it's competitors . My options are open

 

[Bibifrine]

had a Androide Tablett Pforte IO got my Ipad

bevor I won this Ipad on a Tombola I had a Android Tablett from Archos and to be honest, I was really happy with it. It could read my Memory Stick and my external HDD, because It has USB Master I was able to transfer the Screen to my Flat TV via HDMI cable in full HD. The android Market is running after a few small tricks. Google Navigator was running with my external BT GPS Mouse.
BUT
As I had the new Ipad in my Hand for a few minutes and realized the much better screen and the much more fluid Apps as OS, I imediately decided to use the Ipad instead of the Archos. I stilll think the Archos 10.1 is a wounderfull piece of Hardware, especially for this low price of less than 300 Euros, but the screen and the availability of much better Apps made my decision to move to the Ipad easy.
Now my 23 year old son is a proud owner of a Archos 10.1.

 

[Fotodirk]

Memory expansion is a non issue to you? I would think everyone would want to have the option available to add extra space for cheap. With a proper SD port, you could add 32GB of memory for $50.

Yes but it has drawbacks as well.

First today those who offer memory expansion don't go higher then 32/64 GB at this moment. So you don't get more memory. You can start with less and buy as you grow.

Second this card slot will fail from time to time. I have had such a card slot in a Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, LG and Samsung phone. All have failed at a certain time. After getting the card out and in again they worked again for a period. But I guess this is one of the reasons Apple does not like these expansion slots. It is hard to make them work all of the time.

Then it divides your memory. You will for instance have 16Gb of fixed memory and then another 16 in the expansion slot. This means that you must decide which app/song/movie... will sit in which memory slot. It will also mean that every time you want to use something you might need to select the memory location first.

 

[iVan]

Memory expansion is a non issue to you? I would think everyone would want to have the option available to add extra space for cheap. With a proper SD port, you could add 32GB of memory for $50.

Let's see... That turns out to $1.56/GB.

I installed a 1TB NAS on my network, that comes down to... $0.15/GB. All my computers have direct access to it's contents.

But keep in mind that the main reason behind space limitation is that indirectly it postpones quick file sharing ie. piracy acts (in Apples view )and second it gives reasons to buy into cloud storage.

 

[iceman]

I think the whole discussion should be tabled until March or April. By then the iPad 2 will be out plus a whole slew of Android and Windows tablets. 2010 was the year of the iPad, but 2011 will be the year of the tablet!

 

[Superbike81]

Memory expansion is a non issue to you? I would think everyone would want to have the option available to add extra space for cheap. With a proper SD port, you could add 32GB of memory for $50.

Let's see... That turns out to $1.56/GB.

I installed a 1TB NAS on my network, that comes down to... $0.15/GB. All my computers have direct access to it's contents.

But keep in mind that the main reason behind space limitation is that indirectly it postpones quick file sharing ie. piracy acts (in Apples view )and second it gives reasons to buy into cloud storage.

I understand that you guys like "cloud" storage, but it's not always an attractive option. I can throw a few high quality movies (2-4GB each) and watch them in full quality from anywhere, regardless if I have access to Wi-Fi/3G or not. Even if I did have access to a network, streaming just eats up the battery even faster than reading from an SD port.

It might be $1.56/GB for that SD card, but Apple charges $3/GB for that same amount of memory. So with true memory expansion access, you could expand the memory for significantly cheaper than Apple charges.

The other option which is even cheaper, but will eat up the battery quicker, is to buy a USB-powered external hard drive and stream from that, another thing the iPad won't let us do.


For the guy who said he had SD slots fail on him......you must have terrible luck. I've still got 7 year old laptops and 5 year old cell phones that the SD port still works on. Never had one fail on me, nor have I had a SD memory stick fail either.

 

[Technician99]

But keep in mind that the main reason behind space limitation is that indirectly it postpones quick file sharing ie. piracy acts (in Apples view )and second it gives reasons to buy into cloud storage. The only thing Apple is worried about is having people not buy movies from them. For the same reason they refuse to run Flash. I think in time I will drop the iPad and go with the Android Tablets. Same thing happened with the iPhone, enough Android devices were released that are better than the iPhone. I stopped using the iPhone and went to Android ... not looking back.

 

[wrecklass]

But keep in mind that the main reason behind space limitation is that indirectly it postpones quick file sharing ie. piracy acts (in Apples view )

I'm trying to think of a reason that small storage capacity "postpones quick file sharing." In fact I don't really see the correlation between storage size and file sharing, at whatever speed. Apple's proprietary file system seems to complicate file sharing for iOS devices, but that has nothing to do with how much storage the device has. My 64GB iPad won't share files any quicker than my wife's 16GB model.

 

[xune]

.. a USB-powered external hard drive and stream from that, another thing the iPad won't let us do.

I believe you are correct as far as allowing it natively, however, there have been numerous articles on connecting USB harddrives to iPads using the camera connection kit in a few easy steps.

Google "connect hard drive to iPad", and you get several links to articles, such as this > iPad hacked to connect with external USB hard drive

I happen to be a happy cloud user though, so I haven't explored the external hd connectivity options myself, but I'm sure that there have been discussions elsewhere on this forum that include direct experience with this; ie., iPad hacks

Back to the OT, I always keep an open mind on tech from all companies, but as long as the iPad delivers on all that it does great, I see no need to switch to another tablet. Interestingly, the Playbook was the only other tablet that looked halfway decent, but until more solid info/specs/release date emerge, it's near vapor-ware to me until then. As a former BB user, I don't see myself looking forward to RIM's OS, however, if the interface has been overhauled, I might give it a second look. Other than that, nothing else has really caught my eye, nor has the iPad given me any reason to look for it's replacement.

 

[Superbike81]

Yeah, there are ways to hack just about anything to make it do what you want (or at least partially). I guess I'm just not a big hacker, I didn't jailbreak my iPhone, I won't be rooting my Android phone, and I won't be hacking my MBP or PC desktop.

Besides, that process you showed above looks very cumbersome, much more so than sliding in an SD card and having native access to it in Android.

We've got one week until CES 2011 where we will undoubtedly see announcements about the iPad (maybe the iPad 2) and several new Android tablets that will run Android 3.0 (tablet specific OS).

I started off loving the iPhone, but ended up with an Android phone eventually. I think the same will happen with the iPad. I just like the Android interface much better, and the TRUE multitasking is awesome.

 

[xune]

The downside to that "true" multitasking is noticeable speed loss and additional battery drain, which is (from what I've been reading) why various tech site editors have suggested the reasoning for Apple's long delay to implementing multitasking until recently and why it is is done in the manner we experience on our iPads running 4.2 (also to greatly reduce apps crashing and for faster opening and closing of applications). Now I am no app developer myself, nor have I read anything official on this from Apple, however, from the techies analyzing the why's and why nots of Apple's iOS, this seems to make logical sense to me.

What are your thoughts on this? (sorry if this goes off topic for a second)

 

[Superbike81]

The downside to that "true" multitasking is noticeable speed loss and additional battery drain, which is (from what I've been reading) why various tech site editors have suggested the reasoning for Apple's long delay to implementing multitasking until recently and why it is is done in the manner we experience on our iPads running 4.2 (also to greatly reduce apps crashing and for faster opening and closing of applications). Now I am no app developer myself, nor have I read anything official on this from Apple, however, from the techies analyzing the why's and why nots of Apple's iOS, this seems to make logical sense to me.

What are your thoughts on this? (sorry if this goes off topic for a second)

Battery drain? Sure, I can agree that there is added battery drain, but I would rather have the extra functionality and keep a portable USB charger with me (mine is about a 1.5"x1.5" little square and fully charges my phone) or a spare battery. I haven't really had to use the USB charger more than a couple times though.

Apple does excellent with battery life, which is one of the main reasons I bought a MacBook Pro over a regular, cheaper, Windows based laptop. I've been using my MBP all day long, and still have 3 hours of battery life estimated left. So that would put me at about 9 hours of solid usage (web browsing, installing apps, using MS Office, etc). So I don't think we'll ever really see "true" multitasking on the iPad for that very reason, because then they wouldn't be able to achieve the advertised battery life consistently.

Speed loss isn't a huge concern either for most people, just download a free task killer to quickly and easily close the apps you don't need at the time. At any given time I've normally got 5 or 6 apps running in the background and my battery lasts me all day and I notice zero speed impact. Now I will say that my E-Trade Mobile Pro stock market app runs MUCH smoother on my iPad compared to my Android phone. But the Android app was just released this month, the iPad app has been out for several months and has had a few updates.

I rarely experience any crashes, or as the Android nerds call it "FC" for "Force Close." I'm not a huge tweaker on the phone, so maybe that's why, but I really only use well known, well established apps.

Apple's iOS is great for stability, I just find being able to customize my Android interface without having to jailbreak, running apps in the background, being able to download files to my SD card and then transfer them to my computer later (wired or wirelessly), using widgets, and just the overall feel of the Android OS to be much better. Also, my favorite thing, that I wish iOS would let you do is change keyboards, there are so many great functional keyboards available for Android.

Actually, come to think of it, apps crash on my iPad more often than they do on my Galaxy S.

I think right now where Apple has the market completely dominated is in gaming. For right now, Android OS just isn't good for gaming due to poor programming. However, that has been fixed in the newest version, 2.3, so I think we will see more developers making games like RageHD and Infinity Blade for Android. Then with Android Honeycomb (3.0) coming out for the tablets soon, it will be even better.

 

[xune]

I see. I'll keep an eye out for further development in the area of Android. I personally don't see a need for myself multitasking beyond what 4.2 is doing for me, and I like to be untethered for as long as I can, so battery life is an area that I don't want reduced unnecessarily. It's a half dozen one way and six the other I suppose, so to each their own, right?

As far as apps crashing on an iPad, I've been an iOS user for nearly 3 years now, and I've yet to experience one crash on either iPhone I've had or iPod touch, and have only experienced one game app crashing (archetype HD) which others were experiencing as well based on the app reviews left for the HD (iPad) version, however, four or five days after downloading the app, there was an update that fixed the opening screen crash. For a .99 app, I wasn't heartbroken, but I was kinda unhappy that I couldn't play it for nearly a week after downloading. I've made it a practice to read reviews on paid apps ahead of time and with the exception of not reading far enough into reviews of that one particular app, I never download any apps that have been reported by others to be crash prone.

Another thing that I've read to help apps run smoothly is to fully power off the iPad from time to time and restarting it. Could be a manual way of "defragging" it (I don't know?), but I haven't had to do it yet, although by default, I have used the iPad until the battery was completely exhausted, so it has been power cycled a few times in the past month.

Getting back to Android tablets, the thing I'm waiting to see is something in the 9.7/10" size with similar battery life of the iPad's, for about the same price. So far, (no offense), but the smaller Galaxy Tab failed to impress me on size, battery life, or price. I know that with over a million sold, it definitely appeals to quite a few people, but I personally don't see much benefit to a 7" screen - too big to comfortably fit in my pocket, and too small to enjoy books, magazines, movies, or use it for productivity, not to mention around 4 hour battery life if I'm not mistaken. Perhaps the Galaxy Tab isn't the best example of a good iPad competitor, but I can definitely see the potential in it's operating system. Hardware and app development seems to be e areas that aren't quite there to take the spotlight away from the iPad just yet, but with the multitudes of manufacturers producing Android devices, it's only a matter of time before there is a notable competitor.

I cant say much for other tablets at this time, either because they haven't been released yet, or they just simply fall flat on being competitive at all. Like this for example: Netbook Navigator Nav 9 Slate PC review -- Engadget .. That thing is just atrocious! If I were Microsoft I wouldn't bother licensing a product like that, because it just puts gives the OS brand a bad image.. not that Microsoft is all that discriminate on who they license their software to in the first place, but if you're going to be competitive in the tablet segment, you can't have devices like these representing your OS like that this late into the game. Ironically, Microsoft has been in the game for over a decade, and "tablets" (more like a netbook with it's screen permanently affixed to it's topside) like the Netbook Navigator Nav9 Slate PC aren't even worth releasing. And what kind of name is that anyways?! Making the name extra long isn't going to make it any better.

In any case, the only near future contender I see are larger, more affordable Android tablets, with better battery life, or maybe RIM's playbook, but I hardly consider that real until preproduction begins with price and battery life mentioned. I do think that it's got an attractive appearance though, and coming from RIM, it's gonna draw a lot of the BB users. I, however, am not a fan of BB's OS, as proof of my Blackberry curve that got less than 3 weeks of use before going back into it's box, where it is still today. It hasn't seen the light of day since summer of 09. For RIM to be competitive, they've got to have a smooth and stable tablet OS, and it better not have that moving glass when you press it thing they kept doing with the Storms. Some may like that, but it made it feel cheap imo. Anyways, that's my current take on the competitive field of current and future tablets as we know them today, but in just a short week from now, it's a whole new ball game, depending on what becomes reality from the upcoming CES in Vegas. Let's just hope that it doesn't turn out like last year, where 95% of what was promised never made it to production. One thing we can be all but sure of, that Apple will be watching closely, but comfortably as the iPad continues to dominate this segment. Round 2. Ding!