Hey folks! So it's been four and a half years since I bought my first own computer- a Dell Inspiron 1525. Fantastic machine, still going well today and holding it's own, though the USB ports are finally starting to play up, as is the (imo redundant) disc drive. My brother recently bought a Nexus 7 and I have to say, it's a wonderful machine. So I thought to myself, why buy a laptop next year to replace this one? Why not go tablet? So I throw myself at the mercy of the tech-savvy. I'm just not in-the-know enough about computers and their related technologies, being more of a base physics guy myself. I'm looking to replace my old Inspiron with a tablet/slate/hybrid with better specs. Below is my current specs: Dell Insprion 1525 1.8 GHz dual-core Pentium processor 2GB RAM 160GB hard drive 1.8 MP camera 4 x USB 1 x HDMI 1 x SCART (I think?) 1 x SD slot 1 x ethernet 1 x disc drive and two other ports I've never used nor do I know what the hell they're for Here's the basis of what I want - a tablet - 2+ GHz dual/quad core - 3GB RAM - 320 GB hard drive or as big as reasonably possible - camera's not important - at least 2 x USB - 1 x HDMI/micro HDMI - 1 x SD/micro SD/SD HC (what's the difference?) I have a reasonable spend budget of around £500 for this, and I'm really hoping it's possible. I love the convenience and involvement of a touch screen tablet machine, but I need my laptop's replacement to be capable of handling all the tasks my current machine does. My understanding of computer tech is quite limited, so I hope you guys can help. I've asked on a tablet forum, but all they told me was to look for models that are no longer made or sold, or cost thousands of dollars/pounds. Not much good to someone like me. What say you, oh wise people of the interwebs!
Based on what you want, you won't find that in the majority of tablets on the market right now. What you seem to be looking for is a laptop/ultrabook with a touch screen convertible display. With windows 8 coming out, these are starting to become popular again (there have been several over the years, such as the hp tx1250 or the dell duo) so you'll probably see more and more of them over the next year or two as popularity grows and manufacturers jump in. But as for right now you might be looking at the asus taichi or lenovo ideapad yoga 13. I'm not sure of the price in the uk, but right now they are around 1000$ +/- in north america. My advice right now is to hold off for a while because you'll probably see a lot of price drops and a lot of bad combo laptops coming out in the next year. As such, it's probably best to just wait a while and let some of the better designs 'float to the top' so to speak. Also, just a few comments from my experiences: If you're using this device primarily as a laptop, you probably won't be using the touch screen a lot. It's a nice novelty, but even with the increased functionality that windows 8 is trying to incorporate, the touch screen really doesn't do a lot. I bought a convertible laptop back when vista came out and it was ok as a laptop, but the touchscreen was hardly useful in a lot of cases. Since then I've tried tablets on their own, tablets that plug into docks to act as an ultrabook, and have looked at the new convertibles. Honestly though, for just note taking I don't mind the dockable tablets, but for any sort of work involving software suites like ms office it still comes down to switching back to a laptop. My advice is really just to either hold off until 2nd or 3rd generation convertibles for windows 8 start to come out (likely this won't take more than a few months), or maybe just buy a regular laptop and consider purchasing a cheaper tablet later on if you really feel you can use it for things like surfing the internet or reading
Master Blaster, please understand that Tablets are novelty devices. I own an iPad and an Android Asus Tablet, and neither are laptops in any way. My iPad is a piece of crap. It's an Apple Device, so that's pretty much par for the course. It's an internet surfing device, it's a gaming device. But I wouldn't type anything useful on it. It's not going to have Pages, Keynote or Numbers on it, because I'm not stupid enough to pay Apple for apps which have no legitimate use. Any time I want to type a page, create a spreadsheet or a presentation, I'd turn on my laptop. My Android Tablet is Asus' Transformer Prime TF201 Tablet. It's specs, as far as I can remember: Quad Core Tegra 3 Graphics 32 GB Storage That's about all that's interesting. It's great to have Tegra, as games really do look better with it, but I don't think Word Processing requires great graphics. Quad Core makes it sound good, but it's CPU is already outclassed by my quad core Samsung S3 Smartphone. If anything, my S3 is the most advanced device I have, leaving all the tablets redundant. The TF201 has a newer version, but I'm not bothering to buy it. I'll probably see about switching to Samsung's Note 10.1 Tablet, but only because my TF201 has its glitches and dents which Asus repair seemingly can't diagnose. Not their fault, technical bugs are devilishly difficult to find. But will a Note replace my laptop? Hell no. I'll still go out an buy a new laptop. I'm using an Asus laptop now, running 8GB RAM, 2.2GHz CPU (Intel i7 2nd Gen Quad Core). No tablet comes remotely close to that. Add to that, that iOS and Android (I'm a Droid, since I like functionality) are both crappy OS's compared to Mac and Windows and tablets may as well not exist if you want productivity. I may like using Android for functionality over iOS's crap features, but it's like S Voice and Siri; Siri may be far better (credit to Apple for that one), but ultimately both suck. So yeah, get a laptop.
I've got the same tablets as you I think. I have a first gen. ipad that I use for reading (goodnotes is a great reader program for pdf btw), and a tf prime w/ keyboard dock that I use to take notes on. What type of glitches are you finding you have on the tf prime? I used to have some weird graphical glitches when I would use my keyboard dock, but those seem to have gone away since I updated.
I got to agree on the part of tablets are more novelty and fun then good production out of a laptop. Internet browsing and casual games are the only thing tablets are good at. Plus the tech specs you want are not really for a tablet. They won't have 3gb of ram and the biggest space of memory might be 120 gb of flash. What your really looking for is a new computer.
The closest thing you'll get to your specs that I like is the Microsoft Surface Pro, which is being released in January. I have the RT version and love it.
My TF Prime is overall pretty glitchy. Keyboard feels very unwilling to work (keys that just don't tap when you'd think they would) and the keys used to be switched around. The physical @ key (shift+2) was the semi-colon and vice versa. It also refused to boot for a long time, forcing me to cold boot to get it going again, and then it failed again and I had to send it to Asus repair. They managed to get it working again (I can tell its mine because the dents on the keyboard are still there) AND made the keys work properly so the semi-colon actually is the semi-colon. And Asus Task Manager keeps getting screwed up and stops working all the time. I think it's just my unit, though. Seems glitchy throughout. Considering I have two Asus laptops and both are working fine (I'd still buy Asus if they made one with the specs I need the next time I upgrade), I trust that my TF201 is a one-off defective machine. Oh, and I found a reason why the TF201 fails. Have the machine on sleep, docked to the keyboard, closed up. When opening the machine, it should automatically wake up. If you press the power button to wake it up, at the same time as you open the device, it gets two signals to wake up, which confuses it and causes it to fail. In that case, cold boot the device.
Wow, that does sound pretty buggered up. I've had some issues with the prime getting confused after a cold boot while docked, causing it to only wake up when the power button on the tablet is pressed instead of just hitting a key on the keyboard dock. I fixed that by just reinserting the keyboard dock, but so far that's the only real problems I've encountered. I agree that asus is generally a very good company to buy from, but it definitely sounds like you got stuck with one that is messed up in some way for sure.
Yeah I feared that might be the case, I might have to wait a year or so! Thanks man, I can manage that- the laptop's still kicking yet. That's mostly why I want a tablet over a laptop/pc- I want the convenience and ease of use for general browsing (like coming on here and youtube etc during my down time), but I want to be able to plug in a usb keyboad and do some notes when it's required. The touch screen is just something I really see taking off as we move forward, and is really fun! @Treadshot A1- no kidding, all you usually pay for with Apple product is the logo on the back. I guess it's just too early in their days for a do-it-all tablet. Will have to wait to upgrade- I loathe the idea of having two computers with cross-over functionality. I'll be patient. I don't quite understand the lack of storage in modern tablets. I've handled SD cards as big as my pinky finger nail that can hold 64 GB of data. So why the hell are tablets shipping with such pathetic memory! Guess it won't be an issue once SD cards break 160GB. @Haloid1177- I've read about that! Quite interested to see where that one goes. I'm actually a little disappointed with how behind tablet technology is. With all the tech minimisation that's gone on in the last decade, one would think decent RAM, processors and the like wouldn't be difficult to put into such a device. I'll just have to wait a while longer- I really don't want to get a new laptop and get a tablet when, with patience, I could just get a tablet. They aren't going away, they're replacing netbooks. Hopefully with this new boom going on over them this Christmas season, quality will jump up and I can get one next Christmas-time. Either way I really don't want another laptop. I'm sick of laptops
Making a tablet with a hell of a lot of good specs is possible, it's just not practical. Nobody ever thought the Tablet would ever become productive. It's not in need of the specs you want, nor the specs I want on a laptop. A tablet is exactly as you thought it would be MB, it's for surfing the net like this website, going on YouTube, playing app games (they're not real games for the most part, only a few are actually legitimate 'games') and so on. So no one needs more than 64GB memory. Personally, I've had my Apple iPad for a few years now, and it has got 64GB Wifi + 3G. I've only ever used 3G on Holiday when a mobile data plan isn't useful and it's barely used up 20GB of storage. My Asus TF201 I bought with 32GB to save money (the 64GB version wasn't worth it to me), simply because I knew from the iPad that the storage wouldn't be useful. It'd be wasted sitting around, so why pay more? Ultimately, as much as Apple would like to make you believe their iPads are productive, all tablets are novelty items right now, useful for web-surfing and playing app games. That's about it. Get a Laptop! [/needlessly long explanation for an obvious conclusion]
The memory of an SD card is also a bit different than what you get in a solid state drive like what you get in a tablet or other similar device. SD cards and flash drives are just not built to tolerate the amount of reading/writing that goes on during normal operations in a computer, and as such will basically just burn out pretty quick. I think standard flash drives are somewhere around 80000-100000 read/write/re-write before they start to fail. However, ssd drives are designed to handle the constant read/write that goes on. That's why there is such a cost difference between the two. In both cases, they still cost a lot to produce though, which is why you don't see terrabyte ssd drives in anything yet for the most part. I would hardly say that tablets are behind the times or anything like that as well though. The processors are scaled back to what is needed for regular functions like browsing and such, but that is done to make them run for more than 10 minutes with the rather small batteries they have. My hp convertible was barely able to keep a 2 hour charge with most settings turned to low, and even then that was a heavy battery to carry. Plus, the lack of power also helps reduce the need for extensive cooling to be put in place, which would increase the size, require additional vents, and drain the power faster. Regular video cards and processors put out a lot of heat when they start being used extensively, so it's just sort of a trade off of power for the small, lightweight size. Even with convertible laptops with touchscreens, you still won't be seeing any desktop replacement-level graphics capabilities for the most part because laptops in that power level are typically really heavy and really big to accomodate their power and airflow requirements. Instead you will see the ultrabook levels of performance and battery life, which is typically about 4-6 hours (give or take depending on the exact model), decent enough cpu power, and generally average to below average graphical capabilities (ie don't expect to play a lot of games at higher settings (not that you indicated that this was something important, but I'm just making a note of that))
