This is going to get heated!
2011's Best... Premium Tablets
Now, we're going to annoy some of you with this one. Choosing the year's best tablet is easy. Picking one that'll appeal to the more vocal Reg readers is easy too. Selecting a different one because you think it's right is another matter, however. But let's say from the outset: all of the five tablets that follow are ones we'd …
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Sunday 11th December 2011 13:12 GMT Gene Cash
Xoom is serious rubbish
I love my Motorola Droid, but my Xoom was a ripoff. I discovered it's nearly impossible to transfer files from my Linux box, the screen looks nasty after a day of use, Bluetooth crashes the machine a lot, there's no charging over USB as you must use the proprietary brick, and the SD card slot pretty much doesn't work.
In short, it holds down papers well, and plays an excellent game of Solitaire.
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Tuesday 13th December 2011 10:34 GMT David Harper 1
A satisfied Xoom owner writes ...
"I discovered it's nearly impossible to transfer files from my Linux box"
I don't have any problems with this. I run an ssh server on my Linux box, and an SFTP client on the Xoom. Job done.
"there's no charging over USB as you must use the proprietary brick"
USB provides power at 5 volts, but the Xoom has a 7.4 volt battery. Ye cannae change the law of physics, as a well-known Scotsman once said.
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Sunday 11th December 2011 13:09 GMT JEDIDIAH
Dropping th ball.
> True, but there's a lot more to do with a tablet than watch video on it.
...yes and none of that really depends on the aspect ratio of the screen.
It's pretty simple: Doing video right doesn't impact general usability.
Real machines running real apps like web browsers do fine with the wide format and so do real books. About the only thing that's relevant for 4:3 is old TV shows and similarly ancient computer monitors.
it's simply not 1988 anymore.
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Sunday 11th December 2011 13:12 GMT K. Adams
"Ideally with some slide-out or clamshell keyboard."
They already make those... They're called "feature phones" and "laptops," respectively... :-)
Although I do agree with you - in the main - on OS selection. I think it would be really cool to be able to combine a full-featured GNU/Linux-based OS with a slate form-factor machine.
I have an HP tx2z-1300 "convert-a-tablet" which runs Linux Mint quite happily, but isn't really practical when used in its tablet mode, except to take hand-written notes in Xournal, with the unit sitting firmly on a desk.
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Sunday 11th December 2011 13:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Someone had the gen 1 Transformer dual booting Ubuntu
Not sure how well it ran.
A friend of mine (an Apple aficionado) was telling me today that he thinks the new Transformer, sticking with Android, will work for him as a general purpose computer. He said he was about to order an iPad until he started playing around with some uber-cheap Android slabs that he had bought for his kids. He said the deciding factor vs the iPad was really the local filesystem - which doesn't really exist for an iOS user.
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Friday 9th December 2011 13:46 GMT NHS IT guy
I agree
Been looking at a fondleslab for myself and my partner lately. Have played with an array of Android tablets, the BB playbook, but we both independently settled on the iPad 2.
It's super slim, best range of apps, most consistent interface, best battery life and biggest range of accessories. Although we did argue over colour, him white and me black.
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Friday 9th December 2011 13:47 GMT Kristian Walsh
iPad is the best all-rounder, but...
... the screen is markedly inferior to the panel in the Sony. On the downside for the Sony is, of course, Android, which still isn't ready for tablets. (iOS is a bit weak for larger screens too, but it was coming from a better designed mobile version).
Also, kudos to Sony for exploring different form factors. I can see what they're going for in the S, but the "spine" is on the wrong side to feel like a paperback book to European reader. (Yes, I know you can turn it around, but its weight distribution means you tend to hold it with the thick bit at the right)
As someone who'll probably return to OSX (from Windows 7) for my next laptop, I'm actually very interested in seeing what Windows 8 will bring in tablets before I decide on something to leave in the living-room.
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Friday 9th December 2011 16:14 GMT Nick Roberts
Yeah, about twice as much. Personally, I would go down that Ultrabook route, but my need is more for something that will edit photos, and I'm talking big DSLR files, rather than more typical tablet uses - for which I've got my phone. However, I bought a tablet for my wife for her birthday - I would've bought her an iPad 2, for the reasons you gave, but they were out of stock - so got her the Transformer. Must say she loves it, and I think it's the second-best tablet user experience in terms of touchscreen - not quite as good as the Apple - but far more usable overall with all the built-in extras and that keyboard. Which makes the better present, though? ;)
Forgot to say - good, well-balanced article.
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Sunday 11th December 2011 13:08 GMT Ramazan
ultrabook? No way
I had several ultrabooks and now I'm going to buy another one, although it's piece of history already - Sony VAIO X505-VP. Modern "ultrabooks" all have a CPU blower fan, and moreover, I _never_ managed to finish Machinarium game on the the top-of-the-spec MacBook Air because of overheating and kernel_task kicking in before "owl" level. By definition everything with active cooler sucks, but tablets, the Asus Transformer and some elitist notebooks like Samsung Q40 and Sony X505 don't have one and may be considered more or less equal, but The Ultrabooks? No way.
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Sunday 11th December 2011 13:24 GMT Shannon Jacobs
My experience with ASUS was awful
I had some recent experience with ASUS and I can't say anything good about the company. The website was remarkably useless. At one point I'm directed to a webpage for my device and it's pointing at something completely different. Presumably they had pasted an old webpage and planned to update it, but never got around to it.
However, the part that over-annoyed me was the promise of 48-hour support that turned out to be 6-day response--with the question "Is this problem solved ?" (sic)
Difficult to accomplish, but the ASUS people motivated me to switch to a Toshiba. New small model that the Register hasn't seen yet. Or perhaps the price prevented them recommending it?
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Friday 9th December 2011 16:07 GMT Magnus Ramage
But but but <splutter>
What about the HP TouchPad? Good looking apps, strong integration with online services, great screen (and it's 4:3). There's the little matter that you can't buy one any more, and the other little matter that the apps have severely reduced functionality in places, but hey. I like my TouchPad a great deal, but that does have a lot to do with having paid the firesale price rather than the full price.
Actually I understand perfectly well why the TouchPad's not on this list, but a year ago it might well have been expected to be there. (And the PlayBook too for that matter.)
Still looking forward to the good quality £200 Android tablets we've been promised for a while now.
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Friday 9th December 2011 16:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
No surprise there - the only real niggle people raise about the iPad is that you can't stick your own / extra memory card in it - so what. You can use the camera adapter to transfer photos / media if you want and you just buy the model you need.
Do you buy your new car with a 1.8l engine and whinge because you can't add another 0.5l later on?
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Sunday 11th December 2011 13:10 GMT JEDIDIAH
Fanboy silliness.
Now here we get into one of my personal favorites that did not make the list: the Thrive.
You don't need any extra dongles that you are likely to use, you can just plug straight into the device itself. It's large enough that it can easily accommodate a real USB port and an HDMI port.
Why buy an inferior product you know you will have to buy extras for?
Having actually "been there and done that", I will say that an Apple dongle is a relatively expensive proprietary part that's easily lost and less easily replaced.
You are far better of beefing up the storage in your cameras as they were likely built without the Apple groupthink mindset and can actually be expanded. Fortunately, not everyone thinks it's folly to be able to upgrade an appliance as storage technology improves.
It is good that Apple makes neither video nor still cameras.
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Sunday 11th December 2011 13:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Mr Shitpeas frequently has a point, regardless of whether there's a full head of steam being cooked up as it is made.
Continually naming and shaming the guy when his right to reply is obviously curtailed somewhat - if he cuts too close to the bone, you'll just nuke his comments - is pretty gutless and juvenile. Register article writers get several pages to push an agenda (wonder who I'm thinking of), and the comments section is the place where the readership gets to call them out in a pretty limited fashion. If the article writers can't take a bit of criticism, they shouldn't be writing their stuff in the first place.
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