buying a tablet, under €300, advice please

constantg

All I want is something to read PDFs, a little bit of typing/note taking and some browsing. I'm just sick and tired of turning the laptop sideways to read journal articles.

So under €300, decent battery life, colour, wifi @ least and able to read PDFs...

constantg

constantg wrote: »

All I want is something to read PDFs, a little bit of typing/note taking and some browsing. I'm just sick and tired of turning the laptop sideways to read journal articles.

So under €300, decent battery life, colour, wifi @ least and able to read PDFs...

I would wait for the Amazon fire tablet. Should be good for pdfs.
If you can't wait the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is good for pdfs. It's a lot more than 300 though (more like 500). For 300 you could get a refurbished IPAD 1 which may be your best option.

Overheal

Kindle Fire is on preorder now. a 7" Iconia would be great too but gets rated poorly for sub par hour battery life (its powerful to compensate though). HTC flyer is another possibility.

something like this would work fine. 171usd - proably another 40 euro on customs.

http://www.focalprice.com/CE059B/Superpad_Android_22_OS_FLYTOUCH_101_LCD_Touchpanel_Tablet_PC_w_INFOTMIC_X210_1GHz_CPU_Wifi_Camera_GPS_Black.html

partyatmygaff

glasso wrote: »

something like this would work fine. 171usd - proably another 40 euro on customs.

http://www.focalprice.com/CE059B/Superpad_Android_22_OS_FLYTOUCH_101_LCD_Touchpanel_Tablet_PC_w_INFOTMIC_X210_1GHz_CPU_Wifi_Camera_GPS_Black.html

It wouldn't actually. It'd be anything but fine as a matter of fact.

I have a HP Touchpad. That's a tablet with a fairly powerful 1.5GHz dual core SoC from Qualcomm and 1GB of RAM and it stutters a bit with large PDFs (500-1500 pages for example). A chinese bargain bin tablet with a generic 1GHz CPU and 256MB of RAM isn't going to be a suitable PDF reader. Not only that but these chinese tablets rarely last longer than two hours on a single charge.

constantg

glasso wrote: »

I would wait for the Amazon fire tablet. Should be good for pdfs.
If you can't wait the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is good for pdfs. It's a lot more than 300 though (more like 500). For 300 you could get a refurbished IPAD 1 which may be your best option.

the fire is 7" i thought? How about the Advent Vega 10"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_Vega

Overheal

why does everyone and their granny have a tablet on the market?

I would seriously stick with a known vendor with a solid reputation as a computer OEM. Dixons hardly qualifies. That would be like if Best Buy came out with our own tablet *shudder*.

Acer,Motorola,Toshiba,ASUS,HTC,Samsung,Apple,Amazon,etc. - good known brands

crystallove

I would rather wait for kindle fire, I think it worth the money

blorg

My experience is only with phones/iPod but I have found that Stanza on my (1st gen, so slow!) iPod is a better PDF/eBook reader than anything I have yet found on Android. Android software suggestions appreciated.

I do prefer Android as a platform and getting stuff onto your phone or sharing it between multiple applications is a hell of a lot easier.

For your budget I would think the Amazon tablet would be the logical choice, it is after all designed primarily as an eBook reader.

I do also have a Sony eBook reader- great for novels/straight text (a lot easier on the eyes than a LCD/LED sceen) but crap for anything complicated or that involves flicking back and forth.

constantg

crystallove wrote: »

I would rather wait for kindle fire, I think it worth the money

when's it due out again?

Overheal

I have high doubts that it's going to beat any of the other tablets. It will be interesting sure but I highly doubt it's performance. Even some of the nicer tablets for instance like the Galaxy and the Thrive or the lovely Transformer - none of them really has the same smooth performance as the iPad, which is one of the key reasons people gravitate to it. Flash or no flash. Even though technically they are supposed to be physically faster than the iPad2. Theres much to be said for software optimization.

Theres also the question of how friendly the interface will be.

blorg

It is going to beat them in one particular area- price. Which is very relevant given the OP's budget. And given it is a Kindle, I would expect whatever the merits otherwise it will probably do eBook reading well.

In the general Android eBook reading front I have now tried Alkido again which seems quite nice, maybe as good as Stanza in the latest version and certainly easier to get books into.

Ardennes1944

What about the Han spree hannspad?

blorg

I would just add, I was in China recently and went shopping with a guy who was looking for a cheap tablet. The cheap no-name Android tablets we saw were horrible. Slow with appalling touch response. So be careful if you are looking at cheap Android tablets. He ended up buying a netbook instead; a good brand name netbook was cheaper than even the cheapest no-name tablet. As he wanted it mainly for email it made more sense. The prices of tablets will come down majorly over the next couple of years; they are way overpriced at the moment for what they are. The Kindle Fire is the start of this.