Which Tablet

[Gerard]

Peter,

So i will have dongle's sooner than a tablet. 

Which tablet would you prefer? And what about a tablet with W8 on it.

Grtz Gerard

[PeterSt]

Gerard, I am not sure whether I am the one to answer this. Just not enough experience ...
A few thoughts :

You don't need W8 for multi touch. W7 can do that too.

W8 could be more akward than you'd ever want. With a desptop I am a little used to it by now, but to say that it's somewhere more convenient or nice or anything ... no. Not that I could find. It's merely that you must find your ways in getting the normal UI operable. Then it's okay (but what for ?).

Any Win tablet will be more thick, but it will also be able to do much more. That is ...

Any non-Win tablet will be able to do much more than you are used to for the Win environment. Of course it depends on your needs. But if it were for me than I would not take a Win tablet on purpose. I'd get the usual old stuff ...

Depending on your needs with the tablet (and how often and where you use it), focus on battery life. Not that I know how, but focus on it anyway. I expect a Win tablet never to last longer than the iPad or Android ones.
But Android too is not the best for that at all. Again, I don't know how you should arrange that focus, but notice that the things can be advertised with "plays music for 17 hours" and "plays video for 8 hours". Of course you look at that music play time, and think "okay, I don't even do that, so ...". But wrong. When you play music the screen is supposed to be off and *that* surges your battery. When you browse the whole day instead, expect your battery to be drawn as fast as video playback. Ehm, at the start. Because in a months time the battery will be worn out somewhat and battery life will be less.
And less.
For example, the iPad does very well. My Android, advertised with 37 hours of music playback lasts maybe 4 hours. And it's brandnew. Of course, I can let it switch off in two minutes and dim the screen. But I want to use it and have it readable.

Don't fall in the pitfall of 10" etc, because it will be a wide screen, and in my view that is not handy at all. Divide the height into the width (like 1024 / 768 or 800 / 600) and have a factor of 1.33. Can be somewhat higher, but 1,60 really is "wide". So, more inches (that's how it works) but less area to work with. You'll use the thing in landscape mode, but at the bottom there's always a "control bar". So, there goes more of your height.

Additionally to the latter : when you have a close to 10" with the proper ratio (wxh) you will be okay for the size and readability. The iPad complies to this. Others ? harder to find.
Zooming (enlarge the font size) solves this, but now there's less "text" per page and not all conveniently reads by zooming (like books because one page will now be spread over more).

For the real experience I better refer to others.
Peter

[PeterSt]

There's one foremost important other thing, though not many will recognize it or will even be ignorant about it :

Readability is determined by the font smoothening (like it was introduced in W7 I think). This is all related to how the sooming (or your set "scaling") works out to the scaling of the fonts. Now :

Only with a loope you will be easily able to see (thus, in a shop) how this works out. Look for even characters, which they often are not. Also look at different "documents" for it, because a browser, a book, a PDF are treated differently.
Also (but in the same realm) these devices (like e-readers) can be advertised with 800x600 while in reality there are 800 x 400 (etc.) and the remainder is faked (this is the zooming principe).
So, while this determines the sharpness of it all, besides that you may get crazy of the uneven characters. An E may have less pixles in its upright leg in one place compared to the other (one cm further). I see this right away, possibly caused by my "movie" (HTPC) experience and upscaling. Once you have this in your brain, you won't be able to look at it.

So, unless people shout outloud that this feature is right all over, go to a shop, bring that loope and compare yourself. You will see ...

Peter

[Gerard]

Ok 

I will use it only for XX nothing more.

Will be a ipad i guess.

Thanx

 

[PeterSt]

Notice that you could be ready with far under 200 euro (incl. 19% VAT) with an Andoid based tablet.

[Gerard]

Notice that you could be ready with far under 200 euro (incl. 19% VAT) with an Andoid based tablet.

That price sounds nice too. ;-) If anyone has a nice thought about which i could get.

Only for XX noting more.

 

[Stanray]

I have an iMac and windows laptop and I'm not religious concerning platforms. I will need a tablet for XX HG and occasionally for surfing and reading email while travelling, nothing more.
I'm thinking of a Android thingy (which?) or an iPad2 (which can be had for under 400 euros).
Anyone?

Thanks,
Stanley

[juanpmar]

I´m in the same situation as Gerard, I´ll get the dongles before the tablet, I never have had any tablet before so any advise from the most experienced or from the ones who understand better the XX needs will be very welcome.

So far the two candidates that I had on mind were the iPad and the Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201...

Best regards,
Juan

[Calibrator]

If anyone has a nice thought about which i could get.

If you don't currently have a tablet and are undecided what to buy, consider whether you want it exclusively for XXHE remote control use only, or perhaps you might like the idea of a bit of web browsing action while reclining in your chair listening to music. Perhaps a session of Angry Birds sounds appealing also .. hehe.

Try and look for a tablet with the highest native screen res in your budget. Something around 1024x768 would be good, 1280x800 is very nice. Of course the screen attributes comes into account, so ideally you will want to read some reviews or look up YouTube for reports.

To gauge what physical size screen would suit your needs, temporarily set your music PC screen res to that of your intended purchase, then step back from the screen until the perceived size mimics the size that your tablet might look when held in your hands at a comfortable viewing distance. If you can comfortably read the text then I would suggest that you won't have issues with the impending new remote XXHE GUI.

I have attached a screen capture below to give an idea of how readable even the current GUI can look. The trick, or rather not a trick at all, is to ensure you have no scaling required between PC res and tablet res. In other words 1 to 1 pixel mapping. In the example below I set my spare test PC test environment to 1280x720 and using Remote RDP, set the options to 1X pixel mapping. The tablet I use is 1280x800 (Samsung Tab 7.7), so the 80 extra pixels in the vertical, when used in landscape mode, accomodated the status bar always visible at the bottom while using Remote RDP.

There are a myriad of tablets appearing on the market now and it can be a challenge sifting through the junk. Stick with a recognised brand and you generally can't go wrong. Oh, and if going Android, try and get one with Ice Cream Sandwich operating system already installed (v4.x) or where the manufacturer has stated a OS upgrade to ICS is in the pipeline.

Cheers,

Russ
 

[Calibrator]

One thing I forgot to mention, and I guess it goes without saying, but make sure it has Bluetooth connectivity. I say this because some of the lower priced Chinese products do NOT have that function.

[Calibrator]

I´m in the same situation as Gerard, I´ll get the dongles before the tablet, I never have had any tablet before so any advise from the most experienced or from the ones who understand better the XX needs will be very welcome.

So far the two candidates that I had on mind were the iPad and the Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201...

Best regards,
Juan

If this is your first foray into the world of tablets you will love the experience

Both items mentioned will be more than suitable to control XXHE; the only question you need to answer is if they might be a little larger than you need if it's main function is just to control XXHE.

My suggestion would be to spend an hour at your local PC stores and have a play with some different sizes

If you enjoy reading you will find the smaller sizes are better as ebook readers also.

Cheers,

Russ 

[juanpmar]

the only question you need to answer is if they might be a little larger than you need if it's main function is just to control XXHE.

If you enjoy reading you will find the smaller sizes are better as ebook readers also.

Cheers,

Russ 

Thanks Russ,

If I only spend, let´s say around 200€ I´d use it only as XX remote but if I think around 400€ or more I´d like to use it also for reading or browsing the web. I think that I´d rather the latter option.

Regards,
Juan

[Gerard]

Russ,

Thank you that are some nice idears!

 

[manisandher]

Although I use an iPhone (mainly because there are docks for it everywhere) and although my wife has a 1st gen iPad which is OK for occasional web browsing, I have to say that I really, really don't like Apple as a company and would avoid their products if I could. About 10 years ago I had an Apple Titanium laptop and quite liked it - it looked gorgeous, worked well with MS Office for OSX and had a long battery life. But nowadays I just hate the way Apple treats people, as if we're all morons. I mean, you have to give your credit card details to Apple before you can get the iPhone to work! I can't remember if the same is true with the iPad (maybe not if you already have an Apple account).

Having said this though, I probably will order an Apple iPad 2 for XX remote control duties after all, as it seems the safest bet. Ordinarily, I'd go for the Asus EeePad, but think the 10.1" widescreen is unnecessary. Also I've read a few alarming user reviews on Amazon (cracked screens, etc).

So unless anyone can come up with another recommendation, I'll place my order for the iPad 2 later today (310 UK pounds from Amazon).

Mani.

[Gerard]

Yup after i bit thinking i have the idear too for an ipad2

388 euro.