Hmm, I think I'll order an iPad Mini on Amazon ... Oh no I won't Amazon has weighed into the tablet pooh-pooh battle, following Apple's blow by blow comparison with a Samsung Galaxy Tab during the iPad Mini launch last week. The gloves are off down at Tablet Club, and this time the iPad Mini is on the receiving end. Amazon is taking a direct swipe at Apple's littlest Pad with a point by …
Android tablets are a shame. Waste of money.
iPad Mini is just an outdated repackaged iPad 2.
And Microsoft Surface Windows8 RT or Windows 8 x86 tablets just plain suck.
iPad 4 is the only true tablet to buy right now.
Whoever buys anything else is just wasting money on bad products.
Mind you, they're all as bad - & Amazon don't have the advantage of a dickhead HMRC boss giving away huge rebates like Vodafone do. The Vodafone episode made the UK look like mugs - Dave Hartnett the twat agreed an enormous tax break without any tax lawyers present .
Private Eye have done some excellent articles on the fiasco.
But Private Eye are just plain pig-ignorant. Vodafone paid the tax it was legally required to on German sales in Germany to German pundits. Quite why the UK taxman pushed by utter fuckwits like the "Tax Justice Network" thought they had any chance of claiming additional tax is kind of hard to see.
Great meme, greedy corporate doesn't pay the taxes we think that they should pay so we can waste it on buying votes, but utterly dishonest.
I have an Android tablet (well, a firesale touchpad with Android installed) and I'm happy with it. I use it a few times a week to read books and play the odd game, and I've been known to watch films and TV shows on it when travelling and bored. I don't feel i wasted my money, partly because I didn't pay much in the first place but also because I get some good use out of it.
I expect the experience on most of the current crop of Android tablets, especially the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire would be similar but more polished, and I would be more than happy to pay the price of the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire if I were in the market for a new tablet.
Conclusion, I don't agree with you, but I'm certainly not saying your opinion is not valid.
It's the return of Joerg! The rabid, foaming at the mouth, teeth-gnashing, jihadist, android-chewing kindle-spitting-out and surface-tramping-into-the-dirt fanboi extraordinaire.
Youv'e missed a few articles out, but it's good to have you back, you entertain me no end with your barking mad posts.
"It's the return of Joerg! The rabid, foaming at the mouth, teeth-gnashing, jihadist, android-chewing kindle-spitting-out and surface-tramping-into-the-dirt fanboi extraordinaire."
Yeah, he's more interesting than the other mentally impaired one-note wonders like Obviously!, RICHTO or JaitcH(sic)- his thought processes are often so mangled that it's often unclear what he's actually cross about. It's a fun game to see what the object of ire really is, under all the spittle.
mmm, personally I really can't see the point of any tablet, they are horrible pointless devices. However, the android ones seem as capable as any other, microsoft are microsoft - so pretty good in general with a few well published blips, apple are apple - plain expensive, generally more restricted and less good than the competition, but being vastly over priced for what they are appeal to the sort of 'I'm richer than you' fool who thinks people are impressed by how much cash they can squander. Frankly I'll stick to a laptop with a keyboard...
@Dave 15: The only good use I have seen for a tablet is reading a book (still like the book itself better) or as a remote control for an over-complicated automated house setup. If I have anything with even the smallest scrap of seriousness to accomplish I will pick a full desktop when available or a laptop when not. Nice to have if it is free and non-exchangeable but otherwise a waste of money.
"mmm, personally I really can't see the point of any tablet"
Fair enough - you don't have a use for one. I'll be using mine tonight as an adjunct to the laptop because it gives me multitouch control on faders when I'm mixing the band tonight from wherever I want to listen in the venue... and yes it is Apple because that's what the software's available for and frankly the price pales into insignificance compared to the rest of my audio system
Well you might use one for that, but it's still nothing that hasn't been done before by devices (most obviously by actual mixers). Also sad to hear software only being produced for the minority of Apple users - we hear Apple uses whining when companies "only" support the 90% of Windows users, but now it's okay to only support the minority with an ipad? I find this sad.
I agree because, PERSONALLY, I have little use for tablets BUT (and here it is) our household does have a Kindle Fire that gets A LOT of use. 1) Wife watches Food Network while keeping website up on Kindle. Bookmarks recipes and then sets the Kindle up on a stand while cooking (don't try THAT with a laptop or while holding your smartphone close enough to you can read the recipe). Tablet wins.
2) To keep my toddle from driving us both insane on 1-2 hour drives, we hand him the Kindle and he watches movies in the car (we can also strap it to seat)
3) If my phone is charging and the wife needs use of a full desktop and all I want to do is read some news, I take the Kindle and use Pulse.
4) We have one TV. My son might be watching something on the DVR or Netflix, my wife might be on the computer (we also have one laptop) so I pull up HBO Go or Netflix or Amazon Instant and watch something if I don't read.
So the Kindle is mostly for my wife and son with me being an occasional user. I really wish the Nexus 7 had been available at the time I bought the Fire but for a $180 item (got it on sale), it was worth the price.
@Gussy2000 (or other Kindle Fire owner).
As you have one, can you tell me how open the device is? Personally both the iPad mini and Kindle Fire look like fun devices. But the price differential makes it obvious that the Kindle is subsidized with the expectation they'll make more money from content purchases. So how open is the Kindle? Can you play movies, get books, buy music from anywhere or does it have to be via the Amazon store? Any gotchas with it of that nature?
Companies have been repacking older tech and selling it on years later for ages. Apple is not the first and will not be the last.
Smaller iPad2, maybe. But then you could argue that the PS Vita isn't much more than a PS2 thats been shrunk down a bit, and I can pick up a PS2 on ebay for next to nothing, so by the same virtue an iPad mini should be really cheap - oh, wait, it costs less than the iPad 2. Erm.
@ Andrew James...
But then you could argue that the PS Vita isn't much more than a PS2 thats been shrunk down a bit,
You could argue that, but you'd be laughed at for stating something so obviously incorrect. The PS Vita is roughly as powerful as a PS3/360 (some games look exactly the same on the PSV as they do on the PS3) so if they had the hardware support they would be able to play PS2 games without breaking a sweat.
Yeah, I wonder sometimes if I wasted $125 on my Android 4 iPad MIni .... er Archos 80 - about same screen size, same resolution, microSD slot, micro USB, full USB, mini HDMI. Granted it is about twice as thick/heavy, but I can't hold anything that big for long anyway without getting my carpal tunnel aggravated, and it does not matter much since I can prop up the Archos on its trademark built-in kickstand. It does all I want from a non-true tablet - not sure what I would do with a "true" tablet that is bigger and harder to hold, and locked down to Apple's walled garden and costs over 3 times as much. But for the price (even times 2 - got the wife one, and that is all she has taken on several trips now to check email/FaceBook/etc), I don't feel enough pain in the wallet to care about it.
YMMV
Well I'll be hornswoggled...It's the Old Time Religion. You don't get that kind of evangelical fervor from today's fanbois (sorry bunch of johnny-come-lately's and where were they when the rest of us were in the trenches fightin' for our last Performas)
"iPad 4 is the only true tablet. . ."
Let me hear you say AMEN !
Is it really taking the high ground to state that a screen larger than 720p — and about 77% as many pixels as what Amazon calls 'HD' — is "standard definition" and to imply that the iPad has no Wifi? I'm also unclear how they arrive at the claim that the iPad can't be used for viewing HD movies or TV in the sense that the Kindle can.
If I were Amazon I'd have pushed the pixel density (for tick box feature completists) and price (for normal people) issues harder, ignored the more tenuous claims and put an icon for whatever maps application Amazon ships into the screenshot as a dog whistle. Since it's a Kindle-branded product, boasting about the Amazon digital book library versus the iBooks storefront would probably also have been appropriate.
I think maybe the inability to play hd was based on the idea that even at 720p (being nominally hd at 720 by 1280 pixels) the iPad mini would have to down scale to fit it on the screen (due to the 1024 screen width) therefore not supplying 1:1 mapping possible on the kindle.
I agree, not full HD, but if it can't even play 720 at full resolution and therefore requiring the processor to work resizing the video, they've got at least half a point.
A bit non-sensical when you won't get the most out of the picture quality at that size screen. Seems like Amazon is confused what it wants to advertise it's products as.
Looks crap with the huge bezel around it and it's almost 100 grams heavier in shabby plastic. They didn't tell me that in this ad.
bezel is an advantage for kids/elderly.. my mobile has a tiny bezel and my kids took ages to learn not to push the soft buttons when holding it..
That said a 2 year old who can unlock and play games on my mobile including searching YouTube is impressive to me.... I dind't start using computers until I was 7
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