I may not be the target market for this product, but I've never owned a tablet. I have a smartphone, a gaming PC, a fourth gen console, but I've never been interested in acquiring a tablet. Tablets can't fit into my pocket, nor do they have the processing power or the resolution of a full fledged computer.
Right now, tablets are mobile consumption devices. Great for reading, looking at comics, playing light games or watching a movie. Obviously, a lot of people aren't really leaving their house so the tablet use case is a bit moot..
But if you are in the habit of popping to the coffee shop or trying to make use of your time on the train or an airplane, they're pretty handy. Sure, you can bring a whole laptop, but that's just larger and takes up more room. The tablet is easy to slip in and out of a bag and have it on instantly.
In theory, tablets should be good for light work too. Note taking, drawing and sketching, etc. In practice, neither ecosystem supports this very well - you can take a note or make a drawing, but you can't _do_ anything with the output. There's no sending your diagram to a pc for meaningful usage or integrating your note with your actual knowledgebase. The tablets are too locked down.
I know more tablet owners who do at least half of their work on their tablet, than I know tablet owners that only use tablets for entertainment/“consumption”. Some examples: (1) a VP of Engineering, (2) a designer/creative software engineer, (3) a teacher, (4) a documentary film maker.
> There's no sending your diagram to a pc for meaningful usage
This is two taps on iPad in most apps: tap share, then tap the Airdrop icon for your laptop or other device.
> integrating your note with your actual knowledgebase
Notion, Quip, Google Docs, Coda, Microsoft Office all run fine on iPad.
Sharing actions are limited. It depends on output and not all apps share well. Sharing is also 1:1. There is no "master these pages and share out a few pages".
On notes:
1. Notion doesn't have offline support, mobile exports don't work last I tried, no printing or sharing. Notion is block based, making it not appropriate for notes.
2. Quip is just a bad app. It's also a block based editor, and an office suite, making it inappropriate for notes.
3. Google docs is a word processor/office suite, not a note taking app. It has severe, severe lag past about 30 or 40 pages which renders it unusable. It has very broken behavior when you paste formatted text.
4. No experience with coda
5. Microsoft office is an office suite. It has the same general problems as Google Docs.
A note taking app, must:
+ Flow text correctly (not block based)
+ Handle copying and pasting correctly without barfing my formatting
+ Work offline. My notes are not useful if I can only get to them when I have internet.
+ Not be a word processor. Word processors are designed to format documents, not capture information quickly. Using a word proccessor for notes is like using the photoshop text tool to write essays.
+ It should handle and operate on a directory of files. I do not have one note. I have several hundred. Even a modest project is going to have a few note files.
+ It should load instantly and have no lag.The tradeoff is that you get less features.
Examples of note taking apps on the iPad are Bear, Notes, Obsidian, and I think Joplin has a port.
What does “full advantage” mean to you? That you can run a C compiler? Unsigned binaries? Root file system access? Crypto coin mining? Is it the App Store rules that prevent you from using 100% of this CPU?
My Nexus 7 & Nexus 9 could fit in my jeans pocket (while walking — I would never have sat down with them). They were great for reading ebooks at a bar or on an æroplane, or for watching TV while playing a video game (my desk at the time had a keyboard tray; I could prop the tablet on the keyboard, leaning against the desk surface). They were also great for my weekly roleplaying game; I had a character stat record I could easily refer to.
I miss them a lot, and really wish that there were a modern Nexus or Pixel tablet. They filled a computing slot I currently have unfilled; a phone, even a large one, is nowhere near as good at any of the tasks I used my tablet for.
Do not really recommend it. I just bought it as I didn't want to take my brand new gaming laptop or my laptop with my files on a trip into somewhat sketchy places.
As an FYI, if you are going to buy that Lenovo, buy it directly and use Rakuten to get a substantial discount.
I picked up both a Google Nexus 10, and a Samsung Tab Pro 12.2, when they came out.
Google gave us a year or two more for software updates, but it was a grossly under-powered device - when it started to play up, I tried to install Cyanogen / Lineage on it, but determined it was actually a hardware problem. I think it lasted about five years.
The Samsung promised more - bigger, faster, longer battery, the after market stylus was great - but they abandoned updates, and I think that whole product line, a short while later. (We all have a 'and I'll never buy from X again' experience, I'm sure.) Lineage works well on the device, still, and it's great for large-format book-reading if you don't mind the eye-strain.
I experimented with bluetooth keyboard + mouse for a while, but latency of the device itself was awful. Graphics work with the stylus was okay, but not great. Audio suffered the same horrendous latency issue as every other android tablet. I think that's still not resolved - and was one of the compelling features of IOS, IIRC, which is where you had to go for the really good audio apps.
The Android team must have been working on the latency issues for years now, and it's still a total mess. Actually, forget about audio, even fucking scrolling chops and reacts with a delay.
I have an iPad at the moment and.. it's a toy. I've bought stupidly expensive software and in a pinch I can kind of code and push up to a git repo.. and that's about it. Not even linting or feedback on code. I can't even access my notes because file sync is so damn broken on iOS. God help you if you need to move around an ssh key.
On my android phone, I can at least do all the things I want to do. I even have an actual real bash shell! It's just that it's a phone and while I can connect a keyboard, it's a tiny screen. It'd be nifty to have a usb port or two extra instead of just the one.
The Microsoft Surface, despite being stuck in Windows, is the best "tablet that's usable as a computer" around. It does everything you want it to be able to do, though you're stuck with Windows which is missing a touchscreen based ecosystem.
I'd love to see Google produce a good android tablet with quality hardware, expand AndroidOne to tablets, and maybe even see some competition and new features. Build in a kickstand. Get real stylus support. Give me two or three usb c ports.
My gaming console is a toy. Sure I can probably get google drive to load and pair a keyboard but that doesn't mean it's a real tool.
You can't even copy over movies or books! You can't buy books from anyone except Apple. You can't manage files meaningfully. You can't install useful software. Hell, I can't even get a real web browser, instead I'm stuck with safari which is basically a decade old under the hood.
I made the mistake one time of traveling with just my ipad, pre-pandemic. I couldn't even get and print train tickets in a hotel! At the time I couldn't even watch videos off a usb drive (since added).
iPads are toys. They are the fake version of a real computer you give a child so they don't cause too much damage.
Android tablets are also toys. You can play some Android games, take some notes and that's about all they can do. Watching movies or reading on them is a masochistic experience. And to do work on them - just forget it.
> Watching movies or reading on them is a masochistic experience.
As I noted elsethread, I really enjoyed watching TV (and movies, too) and reading on my Nexus tablets. I found them really well-designed for that, much preferable for reading than the Kindle I had had previously. Granted, a big-screen TV would be better for flashy, Marvel, giant-blue-laser-pointed-at-the-sky-to-kill-mankind, but then a theatre is even better for that! And also I don't want too many of those movies. When I do … I head to my den.
If you are comfortable going off the default path, you can get a very functional environment on them, but it is not the "happy path" by any means and requires five or six apps, a new app store, etc. Not ideal but possible.
Exactly! Have you tried peeling potatoes with iPad? It cannot even do that properly! /s
ipad as a tool is a very good tool, it's just not a linux laptop.
Asides, too bad samsung killed Linux on Dex, now that was something special.
Why don't they focus on Chrome OS? It can run Android apps and has a full featured browser. You can even install Linux. I'd rather use a Chrome OS tablet than an Android tablet.
Fool me once... Google has killed any hardware good will they previously had. My ipad has won me over completely, I am thinking about moving from Android to Apple for my next phone.
My company has an Android app and we are always trying to buy devices that run 'latest' android for testing. Google has the Pixel phones and since a few years there is a list of other brands that can run the newest OS while it is in beta. But since I think Android 10, there never has been a tablet in this line of devices, only phones. It just shows how much of an afterthought tablets are for Google at the moment
Google can't fool me twice. I have an Android tablet and it is disappointing in every respect. My next tablet will either be an iPad or not a tablet at all.
I'm writing this on my Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+, which I use all day, every day. When I bought it, it was the best, fastest and largest Android tablet on the market. I can think of dozens of OS improvements off the top of my head. Anyone who uses Android tablets regularly can.
That said, it's really not the OS that's going to be the issue. I originally bought a Galaxy Tab S7 and within 2 days of owning it, a saucer stuck to the bottom of my cup of coffee, dropped an inch onto the corner of the tablet and completely shattered the screen. There is no fixing it: The Samsung store would not take it to fix it, telling me to go online or phone support. Online forms were simply broken and phone support would not give me an estimate over the phone, requiring me to send it in or go to a local fix-a-phone franchisee, which I did. They spent a half hour trying to get info and then told me the price to fix the tablet was literally $50 more than buying a new one. I sucked up the loss, but learned my lesson about Samsung and the state of Android tablets.
I really can't see this changing through anything Google does.
Android tablets weren’t even the past. AFAIK most Android apps don’t even have a dedicated tablet version, just the regular phone version scaled up, let alone apps made exclusively for Android tablets, unlike the iPad with Procreate, Affinity, etc.
And Google themselves have crippled the iPad versions of their own apps, on purpose, like refusing to support picture-in-picture on YouTube.
I still remember my top-of-the-line Google Nexus 10 Tablet bought for $500... No more software updates after a couple of years. To make matters worse, the very last update had a bug that would trigger a tablet reboot (due to a hard crash) every time I used the Youtube app for a couple of minutes.
Are we talking about giant folding tablet phones or actual tablets? I only saw one mention of folding in the article but it was just about OS updates. I'm not sure a phone that unfolds into a tablet works with current technology. It's a fun gimmick and some people apparently love it, but the phone aspect ratio is weird, they're chonky, and there's a lot of room for mechanical failure.
At any rate, I had both of the Nexus 7's back in the day and was very disappointed when they just... stopped. Now I have an iPad Mini and it's awesome. I can't see myself ever going back to Google after they just left us high and dry once before. Especially when Apple's lineup is very stable. I'm positive there will be another iPad coming. Google tablet? Who knows.
Did the Nexus 7 fail commercially or what? I remember it being fairly popular in reviews, popular enough that I bought one. And then it kinda just fizzled out.
I do remember the Nexus 7 having pretty major "big phone" vibes, since it occupied a kind of awkward size between phablet and full-sized tablet, and I don't think most software were really using the screen to their advantage.
Mine died (I had 4-5 over years) there was a hardware flaw google refused to acknowledge then the company effective just wandered off to the next shiny.
The second nexus 7 lasted until THE LAST firmware update bricked two devices at the same time.
I have a rooted fire 10 now, no amazon or google on it and it's been useful for a few years from content
I got the cheapest Samsung Android tablet half a year ago for the specific use cases of reading e-books, comics, and viewing recipes for cooking, and it works alright in those cases. I'm not sure what other people use their tablets for.
12" Thinkpad from a decade ago still beats any tablet except for just consumption of entertainment. Until a tablet has 3+ USB c/a ports I won't consider them serious devices. But I still need serial and NIC ports for my work so maybe I am an outlier.
I wamt to agree, but i think your lone criteria is falsy. Ecen though I really think phones/tablets should have more ports!!
Usb4 significantly changes the game & makes even one lone port (a sad, fake, stupid, artificial & senseless limitation) tennable. Being able to plug in one cable that is basically a mini external southbridge, an io expander, is good enough in most cases, especially when that includes significant compressed video capabilities & a 40gbps pipe.
I understand the technology has expanded to point where a single port can allow for full capability. It is still just not practical regardless of the specifications on paper. I still want discrete ports. VFIO-passthrough doesn't work on a single port adequately, low level VM setups fail. I still need to run DOS and 95 from disk or VM (another issue) often.
The line from consumer to industrial PC's has just continued to grow, and it makes everything more difficult.
Give me two different dedicated USB4 ports and I think I could make that work. Still looks like an octopus.
> I want to agree, but i think your lone criteria is falsy. Even though I really think phones/tablets should have more ports!!
It's useless when there is no SW that can use them. Also you keep a tablet in your hand. It will look like a lobster with a lot of peripherals attached.
After having a few tablets: 2 iPads and 2 Androids, I switched to 2-in-1 Windows laptops. Bigger screen to read from, keyboard if you want to work, no roadblocks for installing software, and OS updates for many years to come.
The iPad really has been the only tablet worth buying, it doesn’t cost that much at its lowest end device, has all the great and fast apps creators want (procreate is amazing) and really does it all well. I’ve never used an android device that didn’t always feel slow. Didn’t matter how new/fast the device was.
Ok but is the iPad the future? I mean it seems to have plateaued at a very respectable position, but it doesn't look like it's going to conquer the world the way it looked a few years ago.
You mean the success where they were forced to make a laptop out of it with a set of Apple keyboards for iPads, because people were buying those from Logitech et al anyway?
The iPad selling well annoys me, as it's prevented a touchscreen/drawable MacBook.
Apple and most others would rather us have broken and locked down operating systems that sell us apps, it's more profitable for them and increasingly it's what consumers want to.
> The iPad selling well annoys me, as it's prevented a touchscreen/drawable MacBook.
I am extremely grateful that this has been Apple's path, because I don't want touch screen support in macOS. It would inevitably make it worse for keyboard and mouse usage, as has happened with both Windows and Gnome.
I have a laptop with touchscreen, mostly forget about it until i by accident touch the screen, and then usually it does something irritating. The touchscreen is more of a problem then a benefit.
The only devices that really benefit from a touchscreen are phones and tablets. And there for certain types of apps it may even be a better input device than keyboard and mouse. This could be one of those situations: https://www.shapr3d.com/
I am in the other camp. I have a convertible and regularly use it in tablet mode. Be it when using whiteboard in a remote presentation, be it when reading pdf and doing annotations.
Sometimes I even do work in photo editing with the pen on the screen.
Afterwards I just switch back into normal mode and use it to create presentations, write code and just do my work.
I think there are different types of people/users with different types of needs. Why not provide for both. Other vendors do this by providing the same model as regular and as convertible version.
