Re: iPads feeling expensive now

The top-end iPads feel VERY expensive to me. The entry-level one, not really.

Re: iPads feeling expensive now

Clearly you have not run it - iOS 6 is fine on a 3GS - perhaps even faster than iOS 5.

Re: iPads feeling expensive now

That's not typical - in our office we have a drawer full of old android phones that are no longer supported but plenty of iPhones still in use.

Re: iPads feeling expensive now

Apple has been caught loading their iDevices with spyware.

What? Link please. I do have quite a few for Google, though, see paragraph 47 why anything Android based should give rise to questions..

Re: Asus

I've never had a problem with an Acer device which wasn't my own fault (e.g. spilling a drink over a laptop). But my ASUS Transformer is nice and will probably benefit from an upgrade to 4.2 soon.

my wife is lucky to get food

That's epic, grin. I really want to be around when your wife gets to read this..

Re: Photoshop fail

I think the hand is on an ipad mini.

Though you're right: it does illustrate just how tiny the display is. Can you really do anything useful, apart from merely consume content, on such a small screen?

Re: Photoshop fail

>>Can you really do anything useful, apart from merely consume content, on such a small screen?

Well you can do everything you can do on your phone, better. So that's email, games and web-browsing covered. And you can read books on it. So, yes.

Re: more than apps

"non-iApproved iFormats"

That would be anything that's not m4a.

Re: more than apps

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the Android ecosystem.

Firstly, regarding so-called "dedicated tablet apps", what you are really referring to is adjustments made for different screen dimensions and resolutions. This may be a significant thing for iOS apps, since they have a comparatively small set of possibilities, where dimensions tend to be integer multiples of each other. Android apps on the other hand have always had to dynamically scale for quite different and arbitrary screen dimensions, so the first thing they do is determine the pixel dimensions of the device they are running on, and scale accordingly. Sure, some of the older apps may look a little minimalist if they were never intended for a tablet, but they won't suffer from black bar syndrome or pixel doubling, unlike some other ecosystems.

Secondly, nobody does cloud syncing better than Google. The browser bookmarks I have on my PC are automatically copied to my Android device - same goes for calendar appointments, Google News settings, email, etc. Note that this happens transparently across completely different ecosystems (in this case Windows and Android), so I am not locked in to a walled garden.

Best of all, though, I am in control. I am able to change things to suit myself. I regard that as essential, because nobody on this planet knows what I want as well as I do.

Re: more than apps

'I come home and Safari shows the tabs I have open on my iPhone on my MacBook Air, and is uploading the pictures I took on the phone today to it over wifi without any user interaction. Getting Android to do such things requires a lot more work and knowledge.'

Only if you are a complete fu*king idiot!!!

I guess you've not used the sync option in Chrome on a 'droid before - which amazingly allows you to access the tabs open on other devices you are running Chrome on from the one you are currently using.

While St Steve may have determined which apps an iUser WILL use for particular functions, Google on the other hand, didn't. Therefore I use MY choice of app (in this case SugarSync) to launch my photos (and any other files I want, for that matter) into the cloud automatically, on the fly (3g or wifi) which once again, by some form of robot magic, allows me instant access and sharing from any other device running the Sugarsync client, or through the web portal if the client isn't installed.

So very simple, a child could do it..........

Re: more than apps

"Calling the Nexus 10 a great media device, when most of the media delivery is through scaled up phone apps is a biased opinion at best."

I'm guessing you are still living in 2009, or believe the tripe that Apple wheel out at their conference as fact.

The reality is, almost all the main Android apps have tablet layouts included in the APK. Since ICS merged tablet and phone, things have moved on MASSIVELY, not only in apps, but in the quality of Android tablets.

They are way more functional, easier to use (nobody forces you to use widgets or "turn the text purple"), and there are plenty of apps that allow you to continue reading where you left off. My parents have a Kobo and a Nexus7 with the Kobo app, and it does precisely that.

The only tool here is you, trying to justify your overpriced and simplistic crap.

Re: more than apps

So here's the thing. The majority of your post is about the experience by having multiple devices - and so is completely irrelevant for someone looking to buy a single device.

And another thing; much of what you then go on to claim is just stuff that *you* find useful - and which I already do just fine in my way on multiple Android devices (Feedly for news, Chrome allows me to open any page that I've been reading on any other device I've used Chrome on). There are plenty of other use cases which Android users could state which Apple users would struggle to replicate the experience.

I can't think of a single Andoid app I use which allows me to "make the interface's text purple" so I've no idea where you're coming from on that.

So I'm glad you like Apple devices. I don't. I'm glad you can easily do what you want to do on Apple devices. I can easily do what I want to do just fine on Andoid devices. But I don't feel the need to go around disparaging other people just because they have different needs, desires and aims to me.

Re: more than apps

@mutatedwombat

I was going to comment almost exactly the same thing. Having recently switched to iPhone from Android (and borderline regretting it) I now realise that I wasn't even aware how slick the de facto Android/Chrome syncing of just about everything across phone, tablet & PC (Win, Mac or even Linux I guess) had become.

Trying to straddle two ecosystems is almost impossible if you want to achieve seamless syncing. Articles like this

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/5/3732364/best-way-gmail-google-calendar-iphone-how-to

only illustrate how broken Google syncing of the simple things (mail, contacts & calendar) is on iOS, never mind the hidden stuff like browsing tabs, history, custom dictionaries etc.

Re: more than apps

no. Android doesn't do this for you, so you have to search out a solution for yourself, that's exactly my point.

I will not debate that this works for many semi savy users, but my point was that this requires no installation in iOS, and no setup. You buy an iOS device, and check the relevant box during setup and the photo syncing just happens.

YOU may not find that desirable, but people that have no interest in figuring that stuff out by themselves (the vast majority) love that kind of automatic setup.

And I like it too, I'm sure I could get it to work on Android, but I have better things to do with my time than fiddling with tablet settings, sorry.

Re: more than apps

typing mkv in the search box at the app store is a bit over your head, yeah?

It's the whole point of the iPad. The more 'advanced' stuff to set up Apple offers an automated solution (the syncing of tabs, notes ,email, photos etc) while for anything it doesn't do, you get an app.

Photo syncing

@RegKees - my photos are available on all my Android devices, with no input from me. It all happens automagically via Picasa.

Re: more than apps

The photos I take on my phone are automatically uploaded to Google+ (not published, but ready for publishing when I want to). I am not aware of a storage limit, so far it's taken all I cared to throw at it and that includes photos and videos. I was asked when I set the phone up whether I'd like photos to be uploaded at all and whether that should happen only while on Wifi or on 3G as well. When I set up my tablet, all those photos magically appeared on it as well.

The feature is called Instant Upload and you can read more about it here: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1647509

They are not though automatically synched to my computer and I haven't researched how that would be done but it's overall not a far cry from what you describe. And considering we live in the "post-PC" world according to Apple and I'm indeed using my laptop less and less it covers my needs quite well.

Re: more than apps - @Nick De Plume

When I can convert a 1GB MKV to M4V, while at the same time adding Internet sourced cover art and meta-data, in about 30 seconds, why would this be an issue?

It looks like the Fandroids haven't found a decent re multiplexer yet given the number of down votes that got. Maybe they should explore the options, they may be surprised.

Re: more than apps

The reality is, almost all the main Android apps have tablet layouts included in the APK.

Yup. I see this line or variations of it, such that Android layout looks shit because its too hard for developers to code for the myriad screen sizes (and orientation). In fact, if you've ever looked at the UI design parts of the Android SDK, you'll find that they have great support for tailoring the look of your app to differing screen sizes, and probably (like me) find it easy to understand and implement UI design using the SDK. In particular, they define various constants relating to screen size, dpi and relative icon size and so on so that you can either dynamically reorganise your UI at runtime, or pre-bake a set of default UIs and then select the one that's closest to the properties of the physical screen (or do a bit of both, if you wish). If you want to delve a bit into OpenGL, you can also create a mipmap for each icon and then interpolate to the correct scale, or you can just provided a set of fixed-resolution images and let Android select the best one.

More recent versions of Android (3.0) and up also have the idea of "Fragments" to make dynamically-scaled/rotated UIs even easier to build. More importantly, though, they make it easy to radically alter the UI layout depending of screen size and orientation, say by presenting a two-panel display on a large, landscape tablet, while omitting less important options (relegated to the action menu) from smaller or portrait displays.

As for the specific claim that media delivery is scaled up, you're surely having a laugh, right? Surely "media delivery" just means playing a video, and I can't imagine any media player that can't handle matching the video stream dimensions to the physical screen dimensions? Ludicrous.

Re: more than apps - @Nick De Plume

@Steve Todd

if you "can convert a 1GB MKV to M4V, while at the same time adding Internet sourced cover art and meta-data, in about 30 seconds" why does Apple make you jump through that hoop, instead of just letting you play the file without converting it?

Re: more than apps

"So very simple, that ONLY a child can do it"

Re: more than apps - @Nick De Plume

@Steve Todd: "It looks like the Fandroids haven't found a decent re multiplexer yet given the number of down votes that got. Maybe they should explore the options, they may be surprised."

Well, with my Fandroid head on snd my Samsung Galaxy in my hand I don't need the remuxer because everything Just Works. With my Fanboi head on and my iPad 2 in my hands (which as it happens it is, because that's what I'm posting from!) I've got several remuxers and:

A) The files I've been working with (motorsport events which aren't broadcast in the UK) are considerably over 1GB and none of the remuxers are anything like as fast as you suggest when working with 8GB files, OK my PC is getting on a bit, but it works just fine for everything else and I'm damned if I'm going to replace a machine I'm otherwise quite happy with...

and

B) Every now and then something in the chain objects to the audio encoding in the mkv and the only way round it is splitting out the audio and re-encoding which is a PITA .

Bottom line is that not supporting common formats which everything else in the house (couple of Samsung phones and a couple of set-top streaming media players) will quite happily work with s a bit poor, and while it's not neccessarily a complete deal breaker it's a considerable black mark for some people, myself included...

Re: more than apps

Do you?