Recommend Me a Tablet!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Recommend Me a Tablet!

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

zeldadude posted:

Thanks, I'll look into it. And yeah I know it sounds broad but really the only thing that's necessary is the ability to watch videos.

Keep in mind the aspect ratio for iPads as opposed to other tablets. Since the iPad and Nexus 9 are both 4 by 3 you will end up with black bars with most of the stuff you watch on Netflix. However, if you get a tablet that 16 by 9 or 16 by 10 like one of the Amazon tablets then more of the screen will be used when you're watching videos.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2014 13:37

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 16:30

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

How do people feel about the Tab S7 vs the Apple iPad Air? The former is on sale at Samsung's website.

I have an Android phone but also a Macbook air so I have my foot in both ecosystems. The Tab looks to have better tech specs overall, and the base model has more storage, plus with the sales is cheaper than the iPad, even at Costco, where I've found it the cheapest. Plus it includes the pen at that price whereas the iPad does not.

Any thoughts on the user experience or hardware between the two?

Edit: I should say, that the primary use for this tablet will be or consuming videos, reading manga and possibly books though I do have a Kindle which I may do most of that latter with.

It's likely that most of my work would happen either on my Windows desktop my Apple MacBook air or my phone if I'm out and about.

Nitrousoxide fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Nov 27, 2020

# ¿ Nov 27, 2020 21:06

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

How obtrusive are the ads on that $80 version?

Also, can you sideload apps?

The Android manga reader that I use is not in the app store and I have to sideload it.

And I use Google apps on there like youtube? I watch a lot of videos on there it suck to not be able to use it

# ¿ Nov 27, 2020 21:22

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

Space Gopher posted:

Are you going to be using locally stored media, or streaming? If you want to have a ton of local storage for on-device media, the S7 is the clear winner unless there are any hard dealbreakers; it's cheaper per gig of internal storage, and it can take an SD card. You can plug a thumb drive or external hard drive into a USB-C iPad, but it's a lot clunkier.

I'm not sure what comparison you're using to say that the Samsung has "better tech specs," because Apple has been on an absolute tear with mobile hardware recently. The Air is substantially faster in most benchmarks, and although the Tab S7 has twice the RAM, iOS is generally much better at memory efficiency than Android. If you care about running higher-end software quickly, the iPad is a better choice, both because of the stronger iOS tablet app ecosystem and because it's just faster. Really, though, you probably don't need to worry too much about performance.

Longevity is a thing, too, and I would expect the iPad to remain useful - in the sense of getting updates and developers continuing to target the hardware - for longer. Apple tends to support their old hardware until it simply can't run whatever new features they've cooked up. Samsung ditches things more quickly, and Google hasn't given a poo poo about Android tablets in years.

The pen is either essential (if you want to do digital art or note-taking) or a not-particularly-useful gimmick. If you're mostly interested in watching movies and reading books/comics/etc I wouldn't factor it in too much.

As far as the user experience goes, I'm biased here - I absolutely loving hate Samsung's hard push to put advertisements in everything. Even Apple isn't great here - looks like you need to buy more iCloud storage! Use Apple Music! - but they have some sense of restraint. Samsung puts ads throughout the stock UI and has been caught sending push notification spam to market new products more than once. A new high-end Samsung tablet will have more ads sprinkled throughout the UI than a cheap Fire tablet - and you can pay a few bucks extra to turn off the ads on the Fire, too (or even just complain a few times to Amazon until you get a sympathetic customer support rep who will do it for free). But, I know a lot of people don't mind it as much, so if you're not usually bothered by ads then it might not be a dealbreaker for you.

Overall, if you're not super price conscious and mostly watch streaming media, I'd go for the iPad based on the longevity more than anything. If you want a ton of local storage and don't mind ads, I'd advise you to choose the Samsung even though I wouldn't buy it myself because of those drat ads.

You make a good point and the ability to use the iPad for sidecar could be useful in a work setting since I can essentially expand to two monitors if need be.

I really do wish that they had like a 128 GB option. 64 gigs just seem so limiting. And $150 upgrade to the next storage level is extremely pricey.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2020 23:27

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

Just to alert folks on here, since the only use my android tablet sees is for reading Tachiyomi,

iOS finally has a port of the only good manga reading app in Tachimanga. You can even import your Tachiyomi backup to it.

I have literally no reason to recommend an android tablet now.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2023 18:05

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

Tachiyomi has extremely extensive and quick to update extension support for pulling the images off of the websites. If there's a webcomic or Manga you want to read somewhere there's a 99% chance that there's an extension that will work in Tachi.

It also just generally has a really good UI and an easy to use backup so your lists aren't tied down in one device. The only thing that's really missing from it is cross-device syncing which I don't think any comic reader really has that I know of.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2023 19:54

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

BoldFace posted:

I thought Apple had stricter policies in place for apps like this, which can be seen as piracy.

It does not have any of the extensions included. You have to go to a site in your web browser and click on a link to download the repo list separately.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2023 22:33

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 16:30

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

repiv posted:

that kind of rules lawyering usually doesn't work on apple, like torrent clients are banned from the app store even though they technically don't include links to any content

i wouldn't count on tachiyomi staying up forever

Other manga readers have stuck around for years by doing this.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/paperback-a-komga-client/id1626613373 for example

# ¿ Dec 22, 2023 03:14

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