Thoughts on the various tablets?

A load of them about to be released.

Do you have an iPad? Are you looking at getting one of the Samsung tablets about to be released here or perhaps the Xoom by Motorolla?
I am currently looking into the Samsung tablets. Larger reso than the iPad. The new 10.1 looks like a good one.
Going to use it mainly for a bit of SEO and store updating in the lounge rather than sitting at a PC or laptop.

Keen to hear what people know about them all from reading or first hand experience.

I had a samsung tab until my g/f left it in a taxi.

They're definitely the best.

Have used: iPad, iPad2, Galaxy.
Would buy: iPad2.

Honeycomb shows *some* promise for Android tablets, but virtually everything else sucks. Cold hard specifications are largely irrelevant when it comes to the high end tablets. UI is king, and Apple has that down.

Xoom? Laughable.

Grrr! Is this a new one or the one with the kid who you dicthed a while back?

i.e. this. The resolution is important to you why exactly?

streaming teh 1080p pr0ns

The one with a kid..

I have an iPad.

I like it.

I used an aPad for about 10 minutes.

Did not like.

To fit more text onto the screen when doing SEO really so I am not scrolling scrolling.

I need to really give them both a full go before I know if it makes a difference or not.

Umm....

Given the same size screen, higher res means more text yes, but it's also smaller.

still easy to read though at that resolution.

Also both your point and my point don't matter *because* it's a tablet. Scrolling/zooming is so easy and intuitive fitting just the little bit more text on screen - no one gives a shit.

Has iPad...it's fun...it's mostly just games and books and surfing the web from the couch...don't really feel like they're worth the money tho...great user interface, but resticted on how you connect, how you get your stuff, no USB etc etc...

Saw a snippet on TV for some Windows one which looked pretty decent, with 2 USB, 1 micro USB, 1 micro SD...but no idea what it's functionality would be like

Have iPad, love iPad but no particular view on it's worth against other tablets. I'm a whore to the Apple ecosystem so makes sense for me...

I forgot to mention the Windows ones*. They BARK. Just awful, awful things. Win7 is terrible as a tablet UI, so you end up with all kinds of nasty bullshit hacked into it.

People keep going on about USB ports; why?

Another good point - The Apple iTunes Store pisses all over the Android Marketplace.



*Forgot to mention because it was so awful I blotted it from my mind.

Would be a nice feature, heck, would be nice to be able to put things on your device in some other way than having to go through iTunes...more laptop/external drive functionality to drag and drop shit on there...Apple make their things pretty limiting in that regard.

Yeah, tbh this would be the #1 reason I wouldn't buy an iPad. I want to copy across my own media easily and play it without having to fuck about.

^ I've still yet to figure how I put a downloaded AVI file on to my iPad

Agree! The USB feature on Samsung definitely makes things easier.

Urgh. One of THEM! Move along, move along

Believe me others will be liking the idea as well. It is not a huge increase but will make a difference depending on what you intend on using it for the most.

I am still deciding between the iPad2 and Samsung at this point. iPad also has way more apps at this point but that should chnage resonably fast. The specific SEO apps for Android have increased dramatically over the last few months.

The file limitations of the iPad and Apple in general put me off a fair bit. Not sure if it is a major concern with what I plan to be using this for though.

Also the new version of the Samsung 10.1 is the one I would be after. Thinner and a few other alterations to it.

Has not been released yet as far as I can tell. Have you checked them out online Kris?

I read recently that there are hints that iOS v5 might do away with needing itunes to sync stuff. I don't own any "i" products though so I only know what I read which I guess is a bit different from actual experience.

Theres a number of apps that will play AVI. The app then appears in iTunes and you add the movies you want and it syncs to the app on the iPad. I have VLC for that but it got pulled from the App Store.

Best way of doing file management is Dropbox IMO, yet to fully explore it's limitations though. But the app-centric rather than folder/file-centric approach in iOS does take a while to get your head around and definitely has limitations...

Also, if you just want to watch AVIs at home, AirVideo = amazing.

Yeah, the fact that iOS doesn't have a file system (in the conventional sense of the term) makes USB carry on tricky. Seeing how badly multiple file systems are implemented in Android kinda validates Apple's design.

That's without even getting into the business reasons for it.

AirPlay is the best shit ever. Pisses all over anything that comes even remotely close to that functionality.

Also for AVI's (or whatever other container format you have) use Handbrake to convert to native format.

Android doesn't play AVI's out of the box anyway.

The bigger problem is that AVI is simply a container file. The video data inside an AVI can be encoded in a pile of different ways.

As nice as the iPad is my loathing for iTunes is great. Maybe my desire to sell Steve a small part of my soul or join Stan will beat out my hatred for iTunes....

At least on an iPad you can get away with barely touching iTunes.

And that episode was fucking hilarious, so many little in jokes :>

Why are people so randomly anti Apple?

The iPad is the best range for 90% of people who want a tablet, end of story.

The build quality, application selection and UI design are a long way ahead of anything Android. There is no third place, beyond that they are all so bad they aren't worth talking about.

Sure you can't connect USB devices, but things like Google Documents mean if you have a decent internet connection it doesn't matter.

The most galling implication of no file system is the inability to reply to emails with an attachment. You can go to various apps and email a file as attachment (and GoodReader etc let you attach various formats to one email) but Mail itself can't as it would have nowhere to look for things to attach - what would it present you given it has no system file structure?

Interestingly I hadn't noticed it myself until a friend using his heavily for business pointed it out...

Unsure if this applies to other smartphone/tablet OSs as well.

Same as quicktimes.

Typing this on my iPad by the way and switching over to the new app-book version of Our Choice by Al Gore. In Grey Lynn too. WHAT A WANKER

(That app-book is pretty amazing though - wanted to read the book, $6 is reasonable and the layout, flow and interaction are fantastic. Excellent example of where non-fictions books can head in the digital age)

I'm not antu apple at all, i love apple.

But the size of the Galaxy is much better than ipad, and i think much more then 10% of people who buy tablet would prefer Galaxy because of it's size.

Word. Cloud ftw.

But as you say, virtually every single app allows you to email as an attachment, so it's a fairly moot point, apart from the odd UX aspect of it.

To further jbs's point - if you're buying a tablet using any other justification that User Experience, you're doing it wrong. And UX is where iPad wins hands down.

Except if someone emails you saying "can I have the brochure and price list for XYZ" you can't just reply to their email with it attached. Have to send a fresh email and you lose the natural context around an expected email flow. Minor but was interesting as an example of the different approach and mindset to a system wide folder structure that we're all so conditioned to.

At which point you direct them to your awesome website where they can read the information, or failing that a link to the pdf that you were about to send, which you keep in the cloud. It's not hard.

Oh and for the record, I like Apple and what they've done, I just really hate iTunes, as a PC user (and that won't change anytime soon as it makes zero sense for me) it's a barking dog that is in need of a bullet, or a bath, or maybe both. Most of my not getting Apple products comes down to a) price point and b) I'm a Windows based software developer.
Shit if I could buy a MacBook at a similar price point to an equivalent spec'd PC I would.

No but as I said it is very different to the approach most average folks have become accustomed to.

One other consideration is that I will be using many Google applications due to it being SEO, Adwords, Analytics etc orientated work. I wonder if Google is going to favour the Android / Samsung devices in this area over time when it comes to what they develop for it. Possibly not as they need to look after the huge market on iPad regardless?

Yeah, I guess I'm the guy at my work who is like: "Why did you email me this document/file/etc? Why didn't you put it on SharePoint/Fileshare/etc?"

I'm all about links and single sourcing stuff.

How are all the reports and stuff in those tools displayed Mike? If they're flash then iOS is out of the question.

No flash in general so that is good

That is the crux of the whole anti apple brigade that I wind up reading here there and everywhere at some point in all the techy places I look at. It's also interesting that it was apple that popularised many of the metaphors we're all used to yet when they drop stuff or don't implement some fucking new bolt on hardware cruft or just simplify the UI they get bollocks for it by a segment of the population. Newsflash, it's by design. And as a result it's easier to use. Not to say that apple can do no wrong but the usual clichés you hear in the religious/emotional wars often miss the whole point behind the design.

As I said, I have no use or interest that I can see for tablet (which is good cos I can't afford one either) but there is no way I'd touch any of the "me toos" really. Of course if I were buying I'd do further research but I have yet to read a single thing that says x tablet is even as good as ipad. They usually just.dont.get.it, which is why they only mimic the ipad and why you only saw them after apple released their device. Just like how windows really badly mimics OSX.

God that sounded like some fanboy rant didn't it...

Oh also if we apply more traditional business sense to this, apple have some distinct advantages on production costs of their tablet meaning that anything that approaches iPad in quality will wind up being more expensive that the iPad it self. Fancy that eh?

I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, my flatmate had a couple of iPads which I used a bit.

The galaxy tab is ok, the GPS is good and the SD card is chocca with HD Porn... Can you chuck a good 16G of HD porn in the cloud in 5 mins? Umm nah you can't....

The flash is good for taking photos and video recording functionality also (the flash works as a light for video)

I don't use it much, but with cheap broadband data here its semi mobile, I'd probably rather stick with a phone sized device for portability walking around but its sweet in a car and on the train / metro.

Oh and it turns into a digital photo frame for your desk when you aren't using it.. just what you need.

Battery life is great.. like 3 days great.

Oh sure, I agree it's a bit of an omission, but Rouge covers it well - storing files (especially potentially large files like PDF's of brochures) either on a local hard drive, or worse, spread out on your sales forces mobile devices, is doing it badly wrong in this day and age. If you're high tech enough to be doing serious work on these devices, you're high tech enough to live in the 21st century with regards to file management too.

a) Email is a terrible delivery mechanism for potentially large files - the encoding a binary file into text is inefficient and bloats the size of the email considerably over the size of the actual file.
b) Spreading multiple copies of price lists and the like over multiple devices owned by multiple sales staff is a recipe for pain.
c) This shit is all trivially easy in this day and age, both to administer and use. Except Rogues beloved Sharepoint. That shit is just dire

Sure, but the old way is still painfully primitive nonetheless :>

iTunes sucks I agree, but how do you actually start to replace it is the problem. It does perform some very necessary tasks managing the hardware, and it's really good at managing libraries of data and sharing that between all your iOS devices and your various computers. Once you stop trying to fight it and learn how it works.

Interestingly, it looks to me like the current versions actually run better and faster on Windows than it does on OSX. Part of the problem is that it's about the only remaining OSX app still written in Carbon not Cocoa. It really needs a ground up rewrite.


Interesting thing with Mac hardware pricing though - as a PC user, it's very easy to only focus on specifications - when the other part of what makes Mac hardware so attractive is the awesome design and build quality. My current machine (HP EliteBook 8530p) was identical in spec to the MBP 15" of the time and even has the same chipsets bar video. It's even EFI and is a piece of piss to Hackintosh, and it's built really well. Retail price when it came out was MORE expensive than the MBP. (In part because it has a sick high-res screen).

Compare actual like with like and the price discrepancy closes up real fast. No use comparing bottom end Compaq retail pieces of shit to a MBP, even with the same specs.

I know Analytics does have some flash in it, but, as you'd expect, there's an app for that:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/analytics-hd/id364894285?mt=8



Edit: Interestingly, lots of the people I know who raved about their new Android device having Flash support.....within weeks, they were moaning about shitty battery life, crashes, and how lots of Flash shit didn't actually work. Except ads. Ads *always* work. So most of them disabled it.

*Waits for Android fanbois to chime in about how it works fine for them*

Why would you put it in the cloud? You downloaded it from the internet in the first place right, so you just stream it from there (Also ewww HD porn )



No flash on iPad2 is a bit suck, but having iMovie right there to edit videos *really* easily is OMG LIKE WOW. It's mindblowingly good.



Button on the lock screen for that on iPad.



3 days aint that flash - I *hammered* an iPad1 all day every day for a while and still got more than 3 days. In "regular" usage it was more like a week.

Sorry Dave, that comes across a bit defensive/attackish. I didn't mean it to! Just sayin is all.

One last thing: iPad is where most of the decent app development is going on. Android hardware is too varied to ensure decent enough performance, especially with awesome multimedia apps like this: http://www.iximix.com

Good to see Kris Re Analytics.

I will look into the flash side of it a bit more just to ensure key areas are covered.

UNTIL CIVILIZATION RUNS ON A TABLET I WILL KEEP MY LAPPY THX!

http://www.civilizationrevolution.com/ipad/

Flash on Android devices technically works but suuuuuuucks.

Just as likely to crash the browser or hang up as it is to do anything useful.

OK I can accept that, larger size is a valid use case.

Have you actually used an iPad day to day for the same things you used the Galaxy for?

Thats pretty good, my flatmate used his for work and had to charge it daily (in his van)

Haha you are an iFan for sure... very defensive

So TtheHF, how much are you going to sell that laptop for?

I think the Flash thing is a classic example of the specs over experience problem:
- My tablet runs Flash! Hooray!
- Yes but it's awful and you'd rather it didn't
- But it does! And it has 1.21 gigawatts. How many gigawatts does yours have?

AND MANY OF THE RAMS!

7 OF THEMS! OR SOMETHING!

just upgraded my iPad 1 to a 2 - much snappier. Loving it!

More like:


- My tablet runs Flash! Hooray!
- Yes but it's awful and you'd rather it didn't
- But it does! And it's awesome! Your iPad can't do that eh? HAH! $TEVE SUCKED YOU IN! And it has 1.21 gigawatts. How many gigawatts does yours have?

*A few weeks pass*

- So hows that tablet going?
- Well it's OK, but the Flash is awful! It keeps crashing all the time and it sucks the battery!
- You don't say?

Got my hands on the new acer tablet with Android atm and its light years behind the iPad. USB? who fucken cares, not like you can anything usefull with it anyway.

iPad is probably still well ahead but suggesting that USB (and more importantly additional memory card slots) aren't useful is flat out stupid.



gc.

3.1 hit for the Xoom today with some pretty useful sounding updates:

http://www.intomobile.com/2011/05/10/android-31-hits-motorola-xoom-verizon-today/



gc.

Thankfully, the two sensible use cases for having memory card slots, or USB ports, on an ultraportable device are catered for with iPad: Sucking photos off your camera while on holiday.

Increasing storage? Yawn. See aforementioned filesystem fuckery.

Please explain to me why USB is SO important. And I only bring this up because its such a massive selling point when it comes to these tablets vs iPads.

Why USB would own: Plugging in a hard drive or memory stick to copy across (or just have access to) more media for easy viewing?

And yet, plugging in to iTunes to do the same thing is just SO hard innit.

The idea of a tablet is so that you don't have anything bulky dangling from it. And if you really want to be pedantic about it what you just suggested can be done on the iPad.

Look I'm not saying I won't like a USB port but (due to work) have been looking at heaps of tablets online and in stores over the last week and find it very amusing that the USB port is such a massive selling point.

USB devices for gaming and increased control - obviously not essential when 'ultra-mobile' as Kris puts it, but still very fucken useful imo. And as Yak says the obvious need for many people to have access to large amounts of stored data. Unfortunately in NZ and any other place with shitty 3rd world internet access and rates the necessity to store and transfer data is great.

It's going to be device specific anyway and ultimately what they should be aiming to do is have tablets with MUCH larger memory capacity - both Android and iPad. Especially now with HD content pretty much the standard. Those new Galaxy tabs don't have USB, but Samsung have copied and attempted to trump Apple wherever possible anyway, so that's no surprise.



gc.

Yeah it kinda is? Using iTunes to get media across is a huge pain in the ass. Also, that only helps for the actual transfer. If I could plug in a memory stick then if I'm travelling or whatever I can have heaps more stuff to watch.

I have VLC on the iPads. Not sure you can get it now though, think Apple didn't like it. But it sorts out any codec issues I have.

It is if you don't use iTunes because it's piece of shit bloatware product peddled by a bunch of assholes?



gc.

So what exactly is everyone's problem with iTunes?

I don't get it?

If it were a person, it would be Andy Dick?

Slow, laggy, its default organisation of your music is FUCKING RIDICULOUS, and most of all its associated bloatware proprietary bullshit like Quicktime the steaming turd Safari can eat a bag full of dicks.



gc.

And I don't want my music player to be another avenue to spew money into Steve Jobs' cancer addled skivvy.

AND I DON'T NEED IT FOR MUSIC SOCIAL NETWORKING EITHER, SO PING OFF!

:>

gc.

Also, whenever iTunes updates it doesn't seem to just download a little bit to update from the previous version, it's like fkn 100mb every time which annoys me. And it updates too often

Also if you're having sound issues you get this f**king annoying warning message every f**King time and iTunes won't open until you acknowledge this message (and this message won't appear in your task bar) plus there is no check box to make the message f**K off forever.

It's never been slow or laggy on any of my machines, but I suppose it could be - it's not exactly a small footprint these days.

What is your problem with the default organisation of music?

Getting upset about Quicktime is pretty ridiculous. Would you rather it was bundled in with iTunes? And you can choose not to install Safari if it upsets you?





So just don't use those features?

I don't think three lines on the left hand nav bar are really worth getting all hot under the collar over?

Yeah I agree with this. Annoying.

Choosing to ignore the other post?

You asked for reasons why, and were provided them.



gc.

A music app bitching about sound problems? Really?

Sorry was doing it second but then added it into the post above.

Slow I'll give you. Not sure which parts of it's library organisation you hate, but saying "default" indicates that you're aware you can change it. Quicktime you can't avoid sure, but you don't have to install Safari, and you can turn off the autoupate tool with a click too.



So don't use Ping (I don't know anyone who does), and realise that for most people, the iTunes store is a massive win and your irrational ideological ranting is hilarious.

Yup, sucks. I understand the technical reasoning behind Apple's update system (it's not just iTunes), but yes it's annoying.

On the other hand - you're moaning about a piddly 100mb? On the average day my iPod touch does more than 100mb traffic


Let me reinforce that I don't like iTunes and wish it was better than it is, but there is some things it actually does really really well if you stop fighting it and learn how it works.

I am Mac whore so iTunes is all good on OSX, but what are the alternative players/managers/stores on PC?

Steaming piles of shit. And that's comparing them to iTunes.

Cheers...I've got VLC on my iPad already, how come it's been pulled from the App Store?

So what, I drag and drop an AVI file onto the VLC icon in my iTunes app, then sync to iPad?

What is the reason?

This was actually the biggest problem for me when it first happened. The way it organises the media with an insufferable amount of folders and sub-folders. If you're unsuspecting, as I was when first using it, it completely destroyed my previously well organised music library.



I get annoyed with any programme or piece of software that encourages bundled downloads or makes suggestions as to their other crap that you "should" download. It's too reminiscent of spam, especially when their other programmes are crap. iTunes is already bundled with Quicktime which is a joke.





It all just adds to a clunky, heavy programme that I don't like. As I said, you asked for reasons and they were given... just because you think it's great doesn't mean everyone does? I don't want *any* of that shit infecting my computer. Especially since, as pointed out, that it updates so damn often and has massive updates every time.



gc.

itunes works real well on PC, well same gripes as apple users - the updates can be a pain but I really can't see the point in using something else if you have a idevice...

Not used it much, but some people swear by WinAmp still, to the point of using as library and transfering to iPod...probably just more people who loath iTunes moreso than thinking WinAmp is that much better

Ah I see, you mean the file system organisation. Yeah that isn't the best if you choose to let it organise itself. I wish that wasn't default too, I get that. Kinda seems like you are holding a grudge based on that one your little brother messed up your room though?

And I do understand that you don't like the suggestions, Safari is really cheeky. Your problem with Quicktime I still don't get though, are you pissed about having Flash and Java on your machine? It's not exactly the same situation but it's pretty close.