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I was given a Samsung Tab A as a graduation present this week. I've never really used a tablet before, but so far at least the Awful App is doing well. Two questions - and if this is the wrong thread please let me know. 1. I want a case. Best Buy has some 3rd party folding folio thing for $35, should I pick one up or is there a goon-approved case I can find online (I'm in Canada). 2. I broke my mp3 player. I won't be using it to listen to music and podcasts while walking / riding the bus for a few months, but in the meantime I thought I could use this tablet in my car. Is the built-in music player on this Android device worthwhile, or is there a better App out there? I'm not interested AT ALL in iTunes.
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Jun 3, 2015 19:33
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 04:37 |
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I'm looking to upgrade from my 7-year-old Samsung Galaxy Tab A SM-T350. The main thing I use the tablet for is reading The Economist in their app every morning. I also use it for movies on long airplane or train trips, and the occasional bit of web browsing and other basic tablet stuff. A few months ago The Economist overhauled their app and the new version is buggy and slow and prone to hanging and crashing. I've sent several negative replies to their occasional "Are you enjoying using the app?" pop-ups detailing these problems but I've seen no improvements. I suspect a newer-generation processor and other hardware would help with some of these issues, but I'm not certain. What I want is a more responsive tablet, that doesn't sit there on a half-loaded page for 20 seconds or 2 minutes or forever, failing to react to anything I do except drop to the home screen and close all apps, then restart the app. My confusion stems mainly from the published specs for tablets. They all mention their ram and processor speed along with how many cores the processor has. I assume that more is better for all of these numbers, but I don't see any large and obvious improvements over my 7-year-old device - it has 1.5 GB ram and a 1.2 GHz quad-core processor (Qualcomm APQ 8016). Most of the current 8-inch tablets I can find have 2.0 GB ram and something around 1.8 to 2.0 GHz processor, sometimes 4x sometimes 8x. Can somebody please reassure me that a new processor would run rings around my older processor even at the same raw GHz benchmark? I'm currently considering the Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite 8.7" Wi-Fi 32GBGrey SM-T220NZAAXSA and the Lenovo Tab M8 8" HD Tablet ZA5G0036AU I'm in Australia if that matters. Prices are about $240 for the Tab A7 vs about $200 for the Lenovo. So that's about my budget - under $300 AUD. dragon enthusiast posted:Looking to replace my aging 2012 Nexus 7 and it seems like I can get a Galaxy Tab A7 Lite for $80 with trade-in. I'm pretty sure the upgrade is worth it, but my question is if it's worth spending the extra $20 to upgrade the storage from 32->64GB, which also apparently upgrades the RAM from 3->4GB?
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Aug 5, 2022 03:37
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Update that nobody cares about: I went to a local shop, and tried to buy the Samsung, but they were out of stock. I had a chance to fondle the tablets on their security cords and I thought the Lenovo M8 seemed small. Later, I was about to buy the Samsung on Amazon (local shops were given their chance, but failed, so on to the evil online empire). But, there were a couple of quite negative reviews that hit close to home for me - one person said that the A7 Lite was actually worse than the Galaxy Tab A they were coming from - exactly my device. The Lenovo is available at several local shops so I bought one the other day. It's screen is exactly the same size as my Tab A (8 inches corner-to-corner), but the Tab A has more non-screen real estate surrounding the screen, and a set of physical buttons on the lower edge, so it's slightly bigger overall. Nobody in town had any generic cases that would fit the M8 so I bought one on Amazon. In the meantime, I can use the generic case my Tab A was in, there are enough elastic bands to accommodate a few different outside dimensions. I find a tablet to be completely impossible to use without a case - how do you hold on to a thin wafer that's all screen on one side, and slippery smooth metal on all other sides? The M8 is great, does what I want it to do.
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Aug 15, 2022 02:10
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It's a generic tablet that costs less than 1/2 what a name-brand android tablet costs (Lenovo, Samsung, there are a couple of others). It's probably worth the gamble if $70 is not going to dent your disposable income in a significant way. It might be a frustrating waste of time and money, but probably not.
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Aug 21, 2022 23:42
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ihop posted:That's so sad. My old nexus 7 was my favorite media device and I'm sure I'm not alone in missing it. I check this thread every time there's a burst of posts in hopes there's discussion about some new, decent ~8" Android tablet on the horizon. It baffles me that that niche has remained unfulfilled for so long. I have a Lenovo M8, and it's fine? I don't know what you're looking for in a tablet. I use mine for some pretty lightweight stuff and the only issues are from specific apps, not the tablet itself. Maybe I should put mine through its paces - any suggestions on common apps that might show these flaws you describe?
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Sep 8, 2022 08:40
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I started a new half-time job here at the university, it's an admin role in that I mostly try to do what my boss doesn't have time to do. Emails, getting websites set up, editing the sites, keeping this Project going. Today we had a brainstorming session (that lasted more than 2 hours) and my boss told me there's room in the budget for "IT stuff" and I could get a tablet that would let me scribble my half-baked notes, perhaps more easily than my current paper-and-pen notebook stream-of-consciousness method. The available budget for this seems to be rather generous, I could probably get away with requesting something quite nice. Is the answer simply "iPad" or are there other options for something with a stylus and the ability to take my scribblings and turn them into nicely formatted text that can then be exported as a word document or whatever?
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Feb 8, 2023 02:38
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Yeah, sorry I was pretty vague. I can type reasonably quickly and I have taken meeting notes like that in the past. I use a Windows laptop for everything, and mine even has the party trick of folding back on itself and becoming a big heavy tablet. But, 1) work is paying and 2) a big heavy tablet with a (disabled by software) keyboard on the back is not particularly nice to use. Switching back and forth between my notes, a collection of tabs in Firefox, my email, a spreadsheet or two, and whatever else is going on is a pain, I prefer having a separate thing to look at and write on, either a tablet, another laptop, or a paper notebook. Doodling and drawing arrows connecting things and so forth is something I do, but not very much. I find it much more intuitive to do things on paper to denote hierarchies and other relationships between concepts than Word's autoformatting that always seems to make the exact wrong decision for what I'm trying to do, breaking my concentration and requiring awkward work-arounds. The third person in the meeting was using a tablet to take a few notes and follow the action in a web browser as we worked through an example by somebody else of what we were trying to put together (if that makes sense). She was writing on the screen with a stylus and seemed to be happy using her setup. That's what caused my boss to suggest a tablet to me, she thinks it will be easier for me and faster to convert the resulting notes into a document that can be uploaded to Teams. A few hours after the meeting yesterday she asked me to just photograph my paper notes and send the pics to her if I didn't have time to write them up. jokes posted:I use a surface (pro 8) for work and personal use and it's fantastic for regular laptop usage and also for drawing/writing notes, especially with PDFs. mobby_6kl posted:I think I like the Yoga 2-in-1 form factor the best. But it probably mainly depends on how exactly you'll be using it. I mostly use the kb+m and then occasionally when I need to make some notes, sketch a diagram or mark up a document, it's right there. Stand, keyboard, and case all built in. Not so great if you want to hold it in your hands for 8 hours. Is software good enough at this point to just let me handwrite on an endless column of not-paper, then turn that into text when I'm done? Everything else - website stuff, email, blahblahblah is fine on my laptop, the tablet would mainly be for meetings.
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Feb 9, 2023 00:18
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 04:37 |
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Just dropping in for a micro-review of my Lenovo Tab M8. Pros: cheap, readily available, easy to find the accessory I wanted (folding case), decent battery life, screen is bright and easy to read, a good size for me. Cons: this thing SUCKS at screen rotation. I had thought a few apps were loving up, but this thing suddenly jumps to the standard selfie-camera-at-top orientation in so many different circumstances that it has to be the tablet, not the apps. For example, Facebook. I'm left handed, so I usually hold the hinge of the folding case in my right hand and doom scroll with my left. This orients the tablet with the buttons on the left and the selfie camera at the bottom. If I tap on a comment, it immediately re-orients and I'm looking at everything upside-down. Other apps will never rotate at all to anything other than the default portrait orientation, so I cannot read my news in landscape view unless I'm using Chrome. The other annoyance is the you-cannot-change-any-settings-on-these-notifications (it says this!) weekly advertisements to upgrade my warranty. Just an irritating bit of marketing malarky that I have to dismiss every so often, forever. My next tablet will not be a Lenovo.
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Aug 16, 2023 03:01
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