Buying Tablet Computer/Laptop Advice

[EastStandLower]

HTC Flyer or Motorola Xoom or Apple iPad 2 or BlackBerry PlayBook who has one and which is best?

Mrs EastStandLower wants to treat me for my birthday and I quite fancy a tablet computer. I have a laptop which tbh is more than a little unreliable and old, I think the graphics card may be knackered as it keeps crashing, the battery is useless so always has to be plugged in when I use it. This I use for surfing, banking, downloading and emailing. Only 80gig hard drive but I do have an external 1Tb HD I can plug in for storage. I get really irritated with constant updating, anti virus and instability.

I also have a 3gs iphone which is ok for web access on the move, work email, like the apps and music stored which can be played in the car etc. All in all its just about everything I need whilst on the move. The only massive drawback is the battery life which is just dreadful.

So with a tablet I don't really need internet on the move I can use the iphone. I would want to transfer a fair bit of stuff from my external HD, photo's, music, movies and use it at home on wifi for browsing, emailing and pretty much what I do on the laptop apart from downloading. I'm quite keen on photography so it would be handy to be able to load pics straight from my camera and maybe use photo editing software etc.
I'm not a geeky type of bloke and find all of this stuff quite bewildering. I had a look at my lads mates ipad today and quite liked it as its just like a huge iphone but he said its a bit of an arse loading up stuff from say an external HD as it doesn't have usb.
I might also consider buying a new laptop?

Budget is between £400 - £500 any advice would be appreciated.

 

[simmers]

 

[EastStandLower]

Thanks simmers you've been very helpful......

 

[decmancity]

The best tablet in my opinion is the Asus Transformer. It is a tablet that comes with a docking station that doubles as a keyboard see.

It has USB ports for charging your phone, using your external. It has a quality IPS screen for watching films and viewing photos etc.

A really nice OS in Android, not as easy as iOS but has a nice appstore (majority free) and you get flash which is something iPad does not have, Flash is a key component of mcfc.co.uk for example ;)

I have used the Transformer/Xoom and the iPad 2 and i personally love the Transformer.

I do however recommend going in PC World etc to try them all out :)

 

[EastStandLower]

Thanks CTID I'll take a look at that,
I'm not well up on Android as an OS having never used it, but from what I have seen through googling that model it looks pretty good. I do think the ipad2 really does let itself down by not having the capability of flash and this is a major consideration as you say the club website is pretty much all flash based video etc. I'll get myself down to PC world at weekend and have a look.

Cheers

ESL

 

[decmancity]

No worries mate.

Yeh Android is a real nice OS that is only going to get better. The OS on this model which is Honeycomb is really nice and looks slick on Tablets.

The key thing about the Transformer which is why i recommend it is because of the keyboard. You said that you were either Tablet/Laptop and this combines all of it one. You can get word document/spreadsheets etc all on tablets and use it exactly like a Laptop.

I forgot to mention earlier that the Transformer itself has 8hr battery, When docked with the keyboard it adds a further 8hrs!!!! (Double check that but i am 99% sure)

If you have any more questions etc then just PM me mate :)

 

[Bluemoon115]

Get an iMac. They're very shiny and let you run 3 applications at once.

Three!

(Hows that for fucking balance) ;)

 

[Johnsonontheleft]

Get an iPad 2. Beats all the others hands down.

 

[Pollerz]

I would avoid ipads as there software is not updates as often as it should be and they massively flaw there products by not having flash compatability..

Android on the otherhand is fastly going to overtake apple on both the pads and mobiles they update there software often and smartly.. They offer Flash and the software really has an opacity to it that apple dont allow meaning more flexible usage..

Also in my opinion the Android app market is better then the apple one..


As for which model of tab you should get i dont really have a clue.. i hear good things about the Asus ones..

 

[Johnsonontheleft]

Lack of flash has annoyed me twice with my iPad 2. But HTML5 is changing all that anyway.

The city app is top notch, they need an iPad specific version though.