What Do You Think About Tablet Computers?
 

I am wondering - how many here have purchased a tablet computer or are planning to purchase a tablet computer (of any O/S - iOS, Windows, Android, QNX, WebOS, etc)?

What do you (or your family) mostly use it for - surfing, email, video, music, games, homework, etc? Do you write much on it (either typing or pen input)? What have you found to be the pros and cons of the tablet?

I am not so much asking what your think of the specific model tablet you have, more about your experience with the tablet form factor.

I have an iPad. I use it for surfing, reading, simple games, streaming music, mobile movie player...

I like the size, weight, and battery life. I'm not looking for a full featured PC alternative like redbeard. I carry it around the house and surf the web from where ever. I use it at work to stream music via pandora. I also surf the web on it at work.

When I went on vacation earlier this year I used the digital copies that were included with so,e of my blurays. I ripped the digital copies to iTunes. Once they were on the iPad, I used the TV out cable to play the movies on my mothers TV.

I've got digital subscriptions to Road & Track and National Geographic. I've also got several ebooks.

I've got a bunch of ga,es similar to the type that you might see on a smart phone for when I want a quick short diversion.

I'm typing this on my iPad right now.

I've had laptops (always supplied by work). They are big and bulky and great in certain situations. My wife has had a couple of mini laptops, and we just gave my son a net book for Christmas. The netbook was nice and small, and would be great if you want/need a keyboard.

I think the tablet fills a spot that, for me, is not really filled by anything else. The only thing that comes close is a modern smart phone.

I'm actually not an Apple fanboy. I prefer Adroid. When I got the iPad (birthday gift last year) there was not a comparable/good Android alternative. I don't think there is yet, but there will be by this summer, I think.

I don't own one but I have access to a couple of iPads at work and at home and I use them fairly often. It's pretty good for what it is. What it is NOT is a replacement for a full computer. It's fine for short emails, facebook/twitter, youtube videos, etc.

I suggest waiting a few months. There were some amazing tablets announced at CES a few week ago, like the Motorola Xoom.
YouTube - CES 2011: Motorola Xoom tablet (hands-on)


Also check out the Motorola Atrix smartphone. It's a phone, or laptop or desktop computer depending on which dock you put it in, pretty awesome.
YouTube - Motorola Atrix 4G Hands-On

Bought the daughter an Android tablet for christmas... works very well for what I wanted her to use it for.

I was an early adopter - got a Nokia 770 tablet 6 or 7 years ago. Very nice for a hand held - they've only gotten better, especialyl wtih the release of Android.

I have an Acer tablet (packed away somewhere). I used to teach off from it. It was great for that. We used to have these giant 3 ring binders that we would get from Microsoft/Cisco(I had 40+ of them). Microsoft started making their manuals available on PDF. You could take notes and add material to the PDF files, and also correct mistakes. When you went to teach a new class, other instructors who had taught it before could share their PDF with you, thus saving you the time of discovering all the flaws in the material and points where additional data was needed.

I've got my company Ipad here in my desk drawer. I just can't find a fit for it in my day to day. I sit in front of an array of screens and other computers and I have everything I need right here.

I might find something for it at some point, but as it stands today my laptop has 3g built in, my Blackberry covers everything else. Just need to find something for it to do.

I'm using a nootered B&N Nook Color. Does everything I need it to, which is surf, watch video (mostly movies when the kids are monopolizing the TV watching "Super Why" or yet-another-Godzilla flick), and the occasional round of Angry Birds, Tank Hero, or Space Buster 3D.

I have an iPad and it is in constant use at home. I do not use it for work but it has definitely displaced the home pc for most activities.

The wife and I use it for surfing, email, facebook etc. and the kids use it for games and streaming videos from Netflix. The poor PC just sits there acting as a server for the most part.

The best feature of the iPad is the battery life - like the Energizer Bunny, it just keeps going.

Not supporting Flash video is an issue but HTML5 is gaining ground.

I bought my wife a iPad for Christmas. She surfs the web and does email, and plays several versions of Freecell. I have her email and contacts tied to her iPhone 4.

I figured out how to download e-books from the public library to her iPad.

She still uses our netbook that runs Ubuntu for some tasks.

I have an HP Slate 500. It is a touch screen full Win 7 Pro machine. If you purchase a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, it can replace a netbook completely.

On the Tablet:

Dual Atom 1.8 GHz processors
2GB RAM
64GB Storage (SSD Drive)
Front and Rear Cameras (no flash)
USB Port
SD/SDHC/MMC card slot
WIFI-N

It comes with:
A case
A precision pointer
A docking station which has 2 more USB ports and an HDMI port for an external monitor

I've been using it for almost 2 months now and I've given away my old Netbook. It will do anything a Windows machine can do. I am presently running Office 2003, Quickbooks, Adobe Acrobat on the machine.

It works best if you setup the icons to be large and the fonts large. It connects well with my cellphone (WM6.5 HTC HD2) over bluetooth, WIFI or USB cable for 3G access. I use this on the sofa to surf and post a lot on Pelican. The on screen keyboard is pretty good. You can also use the pointer for handwriting. Or you can activate voice command sub-system and have it fully voice controlled (built into Win 7).

A 64GB iPad is much more limited and configured with the same options, higher in price. My Slate was $799. The iPad with accys is over $850.

I was considering getting my wife a Wifi only 16GB iPad, until I saw they were $499. The 64GB iPad is $699 without options.

It all depends on what you want to do with it. For me, it is my "goto" machine around the house and while traveling.

Pretty much sums it up. We have a Galaxy Tab, use it the same way and absolutely love it.

Tablets are not yet notebook replacements but are getting closer with each component upgrade. For example, we'll see dual core processors running at 1.5GHz at Mobile World Congress next month, video play back at 1080p, ext. So the proverbial "horsepower" is there.

Now the software vendors have to catch up and produce / port enterprise type applications and then we'll be close to notebook replacement.

The Slate is dual 1.8 GHZ processors and will do 1080p Video.

Can a smart phone be used for these or is it too small?

My iPhone does all of the above. My iPad does all of the above with a larger screen. The apps written for the iPad do most things a little better since there is more processor and ram to do it with.

James, thanks. I wasn't clear. The new tablets (Android and iPad later this year) will have GPU's to improve video performance.

Randy, right now all tables are using a phone OS. The first to come out with an OS optimized for a tablet will be the Motorola Xoom, announced earlier this month at Consumer Electronics Show. It is running Android 3.0, specifically designed to scale to the larger screens. Also, 7" versus 10" is purely personal preference.

iPad here, fine for movies and surfing and short emails, would want to write a report with a touch keypad. You can get a $100 carrying case with an external regular keypad, but haven't tried one.

Could you share make and model?

I might be in the market for and Android tablet sometime in the future.

Thanks

They work. It depends on the phone. Some have a pretty big screen. I haveosted here and surfed on my phone. I've got acoule of buddies with some of the reaaly big hones. They watch movies on theirs. There are a few devices that are marketed as tablets, but they only have a 5" screen and built in voice. To me those are big phones, not tablets.

Except the Slate which is Win 7 Pro.

And I think that the Slate has the little video card built in for decoding. It also has the hardware for 3G direct, but no way to open the back, without voiding warranty.

OH, and one correction, the Slate supports even SDXC, the 64GB SD cards! And it defintely has the Broadcomm Video accellerator

I have a ipad that works nice for email and surfing the web. I never tried it for documents. But I've connected to websites that say I need adobe or adobe flash and I go to their site and it says it's not compatible with my device. So that sucks, unless someone knows a way to get it work that I don't. It will NEVER replace a laptop or desktop but it sure is nice to travel with as it's so slim and light.

Right you are again. The Slate does all of that. As a matter of fact, it is really a modern laptop in a tablet format.

And it is probably a one off product. It exists only because HP and MS make a big deal about it at the 2009 CES and followed through with it. Over the last year, however, the market winds dramatically changed directions. Because HP bought Palm, from their new perspective, everything is now WebOS based. For MS, they are talking about better touch screen capabilities and Windows 8 is the tablet OS of choice.

Anyway, I'd love to use one for a couple of weeks and see how it compares to our Galaxy Tab.

Steve Jobs refuses to put flash support in the Apple stuff.

Android supports flash.

I think android is better than Apple.

How much do the Android tablets cost?

The best Android tablet today is the Galaxy Tab, sold through the various cell carriers. About $600 without data contract. The soon to be released Xoom is rumored to be a couple of hundred more. FWIW, we paid $350 + 2 year contract with T-Mobile.

The nook I'm typing this on cost me 250 clams.

That is stupid! Android sounds better to me too. This is my first apple product and it may be my last..... However, it is doing mostly what I want it to do right now...

If there is a Wifi Tablet which supports flash for about $250, I'll buy one for my wife in a second. She would use it for light surfing and reading. $499 is way too much.

I love my ipad, but I have no desire to own any other Apple products.

What is the battery life like on the slate, I can go a whole day of browsing emailing etc on the IPad which is what makes it perfect for me as a portable device.

Jobs refused to support both Flash and Java because he felt that they were both too memory and processor intensive and would make the IPad look bad when running them. I have to admit the the application I have the most trouble with when browsing with my PC is Flash, and any app that wants to update itself almost daily for security fixes isn't exactly a favorite of mine. I could really care less about Flash availability as I seldom use sites that really rely heavily on it, on the other hand I would have really liked to have Java support as it would have made the IPad far more business friendly.

I haven't run out yet. I expect it is 5-6 hours continuos. If you stop using it, it will sleep and hibernate. Sleep = instant on. Hibernate = 20 seconds.

BTW I'm using it for this surfing.

I love our iPad for reading, but for writing the onscreen keyboard is just not a real keyboard. For writing more than a few sentences, I reach for the notebook or netbook. I'm going to download dragon dictation to see if that works.

So, I am dictating this using Dragon dictation for the iPad. I am not going to edit the results in anyway. It is a free app, that you have to download to your computer first before sinking to the iPad. You launch Dragon dictation, dictate your text, then copy and paste it into your application, safari in this case. In Dragon dictation, you can bring up the keyboard correct things, which I am not doing. The processing takes place on the server, your voice file is sent over the Internet and return as text. The app does not work if you're not online. It seems to work about as well as voice recognition in windows seven. However, I do not think you can control the iPad using voice, or edit your dictation using voice. Until Apple integrates voice recognition into the iPads operating system, control will not be possible. I would like to see voice recognition, and handwriting recognition, integrated into the iPad at some point. The current processor may not be powerful enough, but the greater obstacle is probably Apple's desire for every feature to be very polished before it is released. That is interesting, you can dictate' and then S, and dragon dictation knows what to do. You also dictate punctuation.

John, that is pretty amazing, do you say "comma" or "period" or does it put it in for you? I just bought an iPad for $750 delivered (WiFi and 3G with 16 Gig). I like it, but maybe I should have looked closer at the slates and others. My understanding is they don't work with iTunes without some massaging of the video files. That would be an issue for me. I want to download music and video and be done with it. I don't have the time or inclination to have to futz around with 3rd party software. I just want it to work.

I don't have iTunes on my Slate, no need. But I don't understand why it would work any different than any Win 7 machine.

You know James, I hadn't thought of that, it works fine on my Windows computer, so it may not be an issue.

Yes, you simply dictate punctuation and it inserts it; I tried that one: and this one? And that one! And this one. On the other hand, if you actually need to write the text quote, unquote, I am not sure what it does. Let's try. No, that did not work. How about if I spell out the word? COMM hey. Nope, I guess you won't be writing any English grammar textbooks with dragon dictation. How about some Porsche terms? CV joint. Fuel injection. Whale tail. Bill Steen shocks. Well, that was not bad. You should try it out.

It really depends on what you need. I love apple products but have been holding off of the iPad because I don't really have a use for it. (I did buy a new air though :D )

I have a ASUS tablet and have been using it for about 3 years. I has a stylus which is key in my opinion. I use it for taking notes on OneNote that gets sync'd back to the servers when I am back in the office, I also do diagrams in Visio so I can show clients designs right on the spot.

It's handy to have a full blown (win7) PC as I use it for VPN'ing in, wireless site surveys and wireless site drawings along with all the office stuff.

The only negative about my ASUS is it only takes 2G of RAM, other than that it's been great.

I'm still not sold on the tablets... I was sitting waiting to go to a class the other day and the girl sitting next to me had out her iPad, I had my macbook. Its really not that much more to throw in my backpack and it surfs so much faster. I've got a small laptop, don't see a use for the tablets...