mistermumbles: So I may be in the market for a tablet. Do I need one? Nope, but every now and then I do like to indulge myself with some luxury toys. Because of that I spent probably way more time (3-4 hours) than intended comparing a bunch of models at a Best Buy yesterday. Still, with these kind of things a hands-on tryout is always a good thing. I've looked at the bigger sized and 'mini' style variants of tablets and I think the smaller ones are actually a much better fit, especially when considering actually toting one around.
Now the main thing really is whether I should go with an Android one or iPad mini Retina. Sure the Android ones offer a lot of flexibility, but in comparison iOS still provides a ridiculous breadth of products in its closed-off ecosystem. Thing is, I'm not sure I would take enough advantage of Android's flexibility for it to be a worthwhile investment. Yes, I may be curious to run some Dosbox stuff, install a browser of my own choice, and play around with some open source games, but all in all I'm not sure I'll be doing it enough for me to choose Android over iPad.
Even though the Android market is really heavily fragmented it did make for some good comparison shopping yesterday. The top contenders there for me were the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4. Hardware wise their innards are almost exactly the same. Things I didn't like about the Kindle: oh my god it feels so fucking cheap when holding in my hands! It really does. It also kind of looks it, too. I'm also not sure whether I'm a fan of the Fire OS. Seems like sideloading apps (anything not available within Amazon's ecosystem) onto it can be a bit of a chore. It also doesn't have expandable storage unlike Samsung's offering via a microSD slot. In fact, Samsung seems to be the only tablet maker to offer that kind of feature. That said the Tab Pro felt really nice in my hands. That fake leather backing looks quite nice and it allows for a nice grip. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of the button placement on that particular tablet; in this case the Kindle's buttons placed on the backside of the Kindle made much more sense as well as have no possibly accidental interference from touch sensitive buttons present on the Tab Pro's front.
Now the downside on both of them seem to be middling to below average battery life on either of those tablets. Here's where the iPad mini comes into play. While considerably more powerful - despite only sporting a fraction of onboard RAM in comparison to Android tablets - it easily beats the former by at least fifty percent, and I dare say battery life is very important for devices that aren't always plugged in. In addition, I expect gaming will be a big part of my use of any tablet I may choose and iOS is likely to remain the best option where that is concerned, although Android may allow for a wealth of (sometimes not so legal) emulation that Apple won't allow on their devices for obvious reasons. Also to consider is the ever-present ridiculous Apple tax. Since the iPads don't come with an option for expandable storage if one wants more than the base 16GB Apple will happily price gouge the hell out of one's wallet. $100 for 16GB more? $200 for 48GB? Fucking ridiculous. Looking at Amazon's Kindle in comparison their upgrade prices in storage is actually reasonable.
So, yeah, it's kind of a tough decisions as none of the above would be my perfect choice, but these are pretty much the best there are at this very moment. Please feel free to chime in with your thoughts, especially from people who have/are considering a tablet purchase themselves and/or those who are tablet owners.
Side note, my el cheapo android tablet plays the 3D remake of Final Fantasy 4 pretty damn well.
