PCs & Mobiles Forum - Cheapo tablet ideas? - Page 1

In my humble opinion, there's no such thing as a good Android tablet, let alone a cheap one. Battery life is almost inevitably disappointing, availability of apps patchy and reliability poor.

I can't recommend iPads either, but they implement the "tablet" experience better than the Androids.

J Mark Oates
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That's my story and like my underwear I'm sticking to it.
sprockethole.myreviewer.com

A while ago I played with a friend's tablet samsung i think and liked it.  That was my only experience of using one until recently.

However, the other day, in lunch break went to HMV, and for the first time no-one was at the "gadget table" so I had a go on each of the touch screen tablets. I was quite suprised that the ipad was easily the best, but does come at a price premium. the way they were laid out the ipad was at one end, which was first I played with, then along the table they went down in order of price, and the whole sliding your finger to scroll thing did work worse and worse as you went down the table. last was the Archos I think, which has been ridiculed in a few places.

However, saying that, if I had started at the cheap end, I may have that that was ok.

I find weird how people go on about capacitative screens over resistive. I've always found screens with styluses -resistive - way more precise than cap screens. I'm always miskeying or mis-selecting on my iPad.

A lot of the cheap tablets would be iPad killers if they'd put proper batteries in them.

J Mark Oates
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That's my story and like my underwear I'm sticking to it.
sprockethole.myreviewer.com

Interested in the Transformer Prime.

Ste
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We will pay the price but we will not count the cost..

Quote:
sj says...
Interested in the Transformer Primeif they ever get round to releasing it in the UK after America buys all the stock.

The only reason I never got the first Asus Transformer was because I wanted 3G.

On Asus Facebook page they promised that a 3G model would be released a couple of months after the release.
Well it now been 12 months & still no 3G on the first model or the new one the Transformer Prime. 
I really don't want to carry around a mi-fi.

ibood had a Huawei MediaPad Tablet for £307 a couple of nights ago, but I didn't want to order from ibood, they are too flaky
That was a 7inch with gps, 3G & honeycomb.
The Huawei MediaPad doen't even have a UK release date yet just a vague 1st qt 2012 so no one else has them for sale yet which also seemed a little off-putting.
I'm regretting not ordering one now, but I'd rather have a 10 inch screen.

There's an interesting looking 7inch tablet from Cambridge Sciences at Amazon for £189,
At least with that It has the latest honeycomb operating system but no 3G or GPS.

It seems like there is always something to comprise on- the only models that don't compromise cost a lot more than I'm willing to pay.

I've been looking at table PC's now for over a year, in that time I've only bought one, which was a total disaster, a complete waste of time & money. That was an Archos bty. 
 

This item was edited on Tuesday, 29th November 2011, 22:55

Thankfully I'm not bothered about 3G as if I ever took it out of the house I'd always have my phone with me so a wi-fi hotspot would always be available.
Does look very nice too.  Although after Miles mentioned the iPad had VLC I may have to look at that again.  Or the iPad3....
I'd not even heard of Cambridge Sciences until yersterday when a guy in work told me he'd just ordered one from Amazon.  It was 16GB and he proudly showed me the printout.  It was the 2.3 one which as far as am aware is pretty much designed for phones.  I told him so so he may be returning it.  Seems the newer model is only slightly dearer anyway..

Ste
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We will pay the price but we will not count the cost..

Quote:
sj says...
Thankfully I'm not bothered about 3G as if I ever took it out of the house I'd always have my phone with me so a wi-fi hotspot would always be available.Most of my use would be away from wi-fi & using the mobile as a hotspot is a real battery drain.

Also re you mates order for the Cambridge Sciences tablet.
Not having gps is the biggest thing that puts me off the Cambridge Sciences tablet.
Not because of using it as a sat nav, but because having had the Archos (for a very short time) I was surprised how many apps couldn't work properly without a gps fix.
The news & weather apps defaulted to America, so no footie news which drove me nuts.
I couldn't use the local movie listings app because it didn't know where I was.
The weather app wouldn't work without setting the location every time I opened it.
Some apps let you set your location, but loads won't.
One of the many reasons I got rid of the Archos. It had a really poor screen being the biggest.

This item was edited on Tuesday, 29th November 2011, 23:41

Cambridge Sciences are most likely like Storage Options, a UK importer having an off-the-shelf Chinese tablet badged-up and boxed out there and container-shipped into the UK. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but using a name like "Cambridge Sciences" at least implies some UK involvement in the manufacture which I'd doubt.

There's mention on a couple of Android forums about the Samsung S5P210 II, Cortex A8-1.6GHz processor - apparently Samsung don't do an A8 faster than 1GHz so it's likely to be overclocked.

I've had three Android tablets over the past two years - an Eken M001 bought to test the water, a Storage Options MiScroll to upgrade from the Eken and an Asus Transformer as a hoped-for improvement on the iPad.

The Eken was bought as an experiment to see what Android tablets were like. I was hoping for a piece of kit that I could read and write documents on without the palaver of going through something like iTunes. I have a five-year-old Acer PDA I use for on-the-fly jottings but the screen is very small and it has some really annoying file system foibles - including being unable to read post-2003 Word files. The Eken was a disappointment on a number of levels - firstly it was never instant-on, it had to be booted from cold every time it was switched on, otherwise left on standby it had drained the battery in a couple of hours. It had a longer boot time than Windows XP and no chance of any form of hibernation boot. It couldn't access Android Market proper, had a depressingly short battery life and worst of all ran alarmingly warm. It did however, have a very lively on-line community forever making improvements to the firmware so I spent an enjoyable few months playing with various firmwares from people with handles like Lefeudedieu.

Ultimately however, it proved unusable for the purpose I'd bought it for so I put it in a drawer and did a few other things until my last birthday when my parent bought me the Storage Options MiScroll. Unlike the Eken, which ran Android 1.6 (Donut), this ran 2.3 (Gingerbread). It also had a removable battery theoretically allowing for a longer battery life (oh no it didn't - to replace the battery meant powering down completely, replacing the battery and rebooting). So in spite of the battery hype, it still had a depressingly short run time. I'm still playing with it in the hope of sorting it out as I like the 7" form factor and I have an external charger-booster for extending the running time.

The ASUS Transformer I dropped a fair old packet on a few months back, attracted by the detachable keyboard (which includes a battery pack of its own giving a potential run time of 16 hours). Of all the Android kit it's the one I'm happiest with, and what I'm using the most, although it's let down by its support of word-processing apps which is for me the primary use. The web browser's a trifle shonky as well. It runs Android 3.2 (the current version of Honeycomb) and promises to be upgradable to Android 4 - Ice Cream Sandwich when that comes out sometime between now and Hell freezing over. Compared with the cheaper Android tablets, it's definitely proof of "you gets what you pays for" and offers the closest Apple-like experience (which is an expression of facility rather than approval).

All in all, I think the Android tablet market is only just reaching maturity and real usability. I wish other manufacturers hadn't cocked things up and there were a few alternative OSes to Android, iOS and the upcoming Windows 8.

J Mark Oates
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That's my story and like my underwear I'm sticking to it.
sprockethole.myreviewer.com

Good moaning.

Thanks all. I know that android tablets are really a bit crap and that you're not really going to get anything that great especially compared to an iPad. Have decided that 7" is just a bit too small (---insert own joke here---)

It really wouldn't be much more than a reader with a bit of iplayer thrown in - no games, no gps necessary, etc.

Anyway, have opted for a HP tablet from ebay (I know, I know). I'm sure it'll be fine for my dad.