Asus Eee Pad Transformer
Alone among serious Android tablet makers, Asus seems to have worked out what the punter really wants: a really good screen, a realistic price and a handy accessory to tun it into a proper laptop. And that’s what the Transformer gives them: a superb IPS LCD panel and a basic price of £330 - or £430 with the detachable keyboard and battery pack.
If the scuttlebutt is to be believed, the Transformer has been the only Honeycomb tablet to get anywhere near matching its maker's sales expectations. It’s not hard to see why. The 10.1in, 1280 x 800 screen is quite superb - bright, crisp and colourful at any angle. The battery will easily see you through a full day.
It’s not all roses in the garden. The styling is a bit square and uninspired, though I suppose you could look at that another way and say it’s just easier to keep a tight grip on. There’s no full-size USB port unless you cough up for the very fine but not exactly cheap keyboard extra. But, at 675g, it’s one of the lighter ten-inchers around.
HTC Flyer
Eschewing the Tegra 2 chipset and Honeycomb, HTC’s Flyer is basically a big phone with a 7in, 1024 x 600 screen. The absence of Android 3.x isn’t such a big deal because this being an HTC you get the Sense overlay which goes a long way to smoothing off some of Gingerbread’s rough edges. In any case, the word is that an update to 3.2 is due imminently.
Powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255T chip with 1GB of Ram, the Flyer wants for nothing in terms of speed and with it’s glass screen and largely aluminium body it is a thing of both style and substance. Use it as an e-reader and the 200g weight saving over the iPad 2 is handy. If you want to doodle on it you can use the excellent digital pen and HTC Scribe software.
The problem with the Flyer is the price and the ports. Launch prices north of £500 were silly, but one UK retailer has recently dropped the 16GB Wi-Fi model to £299, though when the 10in opposition can be had for less than £350 that’s still not exactly a bargain. And there’s no HDMI or micro USB port, just HTC’s own ExtMicro socket and that leaves a sour taste no matter what the justification.
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COMMENTS
Re: Written by an iPad owner I think..
The writer does not own an iPad, and as much as you might achingly hope that Android has a higher market share than it does, all market data - vendor shipments and sell-through - suggests it does not.
Sorry to puncture your wee bubble, 'Barry'
"An iPad is an iPad is an iPad"
And yet your poor friend's iPad 1 can still use all the same software as an iPad 2 (except FaceTime), is still getting all software updates on day of release (if you're happy to trust Apple's QA), and is still one of the best tablets around even at 18 months old.
How many Android tablets are going to get Android 4 - without having to hack them? Which, remember, is kit that's mostly less than 6 months old. HTC are still selling their Flyer with 2.3, which was out of date when they launched the product! They've not even upgraded it to Android 3 yet...
Equally we can contrast my HTC Wildfire with an iPhone 3GS. Both phones are about the same age (admittedly the Wildfire was never top of the range). The iPhone 3GS is still getting updates and still on sale. HTC were still selling the Wildfire up to a couple of months ago, so they've no excuse for saying it's 'out of support'. The Wildfire got an update from 2.1 to 2.2 (about 6 months late), and that's it. The 3GS has been updated from iOS3, to iOS4 and now iOS5.
And it's not as if I'm cherry picking. Android kit getting timely updates is very unusual. Even Google only seem to update their reference phones once, then dump them.
This is the reason my next tablet will probably be Apple - well that and the Android tablet makers' obsession with widescreen. It's also why I recommend iPhone/iPad to non-geeks.
It's a shame, I was looking forward to going Android. But my experience with the phone OS has been poor, and their first attempt at tablets has been a mess. My only hope to avoid the clutches of Apple seems to be Microsoft. Windows Phone is looking interesting, and Windows 8 on tablets could be quite nice too.
I bought a tablet for my wife for her birthday back in August. Toddled along to try them out, liked the iPad, also liked the Eee Pad Transformer - very little to separate them, a fractionally better touchscreen on the Apple, much better expansion options on the Asus. I decided that for me, I would buy the Asus, but would get the wife an iPad as it was a Cortina. HOWEVER, they were out of stock - so Asus won out. And she's been very happy with it; she likes a lot about it, including the keyboard if she wants to do anything serious. The quality of the whole package is great, and she also likes not having to fork out for apps that are chargeable on our son's iPod Touch, so I've got plenty of brownie points. Remember that however popular the Cortina was, it wasn't actually a very good car... ;)
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