Tablets

All good points, with one minor quibble.

Skype rates suck a lot outside North America. I have the 3 dollar a month plan for unlimited USA & Canada, though.

For example, calls to landlines in Mexico, outside of Mexico City & Guadalajara are like 30 cents a minute on skype vs. 7 cents with google voice.

Unlimited Mexico City was like 80 dollars a month.

Thanks Carlos Slim!

Google is still my favorite giant evil corporation.

I ordered then canceled a nexus 7 32 bit with Cell sim, I didn't like the lack of a memory card slot and no back camera. I ended up getting a Galaxy tab 7 for myself and my Mom. Mom used the snot out of the old Acer a500 10.1 but at 72 it is getting a little heavy for her. So she can try the 7" form factor and see if she can get used to it. If not, I'll snag a 10 in a after Christmas sale somewhere.

I really want a transformer infinity though, just do not want to drop 600 bucks for all the stuff when $179.00 is so reasonable. (for the 7" tab.)

Srathor_sl said:

I didn't like the lack of a memory card slot and no back camera

Click to expand...

Wha? 8MP rear camera and 1.3MP front camera

My Nexus 7 gets the annoying freezing/stuttering occasionally. It didn't at first, but started after an update or something. It only happens when there's a lot of data being written to disk, like caching a streaming video, downloading a torrent, or transferring via USB.

Joboo, The Nexus 7 does not have a Rear Camera. Nor a SD slot. Sadly

I really wanted one too because everything else is great on the thing. But oh well. Next iteration of them might fix that. In 6 months <sigh>

With USB OTG, isn't the lack of a memory slot fairly moot? I suppose it's not quite as convenient.

Yep sorry, kept thinking Nexus 4, rather than 7. Thought I was in the Phone thread or something...bah

To add to the conversation though, I have a 16 GB Nexus 7 and I really don't find the lack of an SD slot a big deal. Between Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Music streaming, etc, there isn't a huge need for massive amounts of onboard storage. That being said, I'm pretty much never using it somewhere that doesn't have a wifi connection, my house, any friends house, my office, hotels when traveling, etc. A plane flight might be the only time you have no easy access to wifi, but you can easily still throw several movies on the device when needed, especially if you get the 32GB version. You don't need to be putting 10gig 1080p movies on it, the screen doesn't even support that so it's unneccessarily large file size, so it'll hold quite a few movies. 720p movies are usually like 3-4gigs apiece from most sites you would download them from.

Been looking for a tablet in the $150-200 range for my daughter to read and do various things on. Reviews of the Kindle Fire aren't amazing, plus I didn't want to have to deal with rooting to use the Play store as I'll be tech support on it for the indefinite future. Nexus 7 is better but doesn't have a rear camera or SD slot and I didn't really want to spend the full $200 on it.

Settled on a Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 I found on sale. I own a Galaxy S2, and I think having front/rear cameras on this one will help when their mom wants to skype them, etc. Anyone used the Tab 2? Reviews were decent on it and I'm hoping I made a good choice. I guess we'll see after Christmas.

Yeah its great, I spent a couple days last year uploading all of my 15,000ish mp3s to it, and now I have access to it wherever I go via my phone, tablet, ANY computer that I can log onto my google account, etc. I can't remember if there is a MB limit, or a # of files limit, but I didn't hit it at all, and that was like 200+ GB worth of mp3s.

Eomer_sl said:

With USB OTG, isn't the lack of a memory slot fairly moot? I suppose it's not quite as convenient.

Click to expand...

At least untilthis/becomes available.

mkopec_sl said:

It said 20K file limit. So yeah its a limit but its huge nevertheless.

Click to expand...

Anything you buy from the Google store doesn't count towards that limit either.

Question for the more tech-savy:

I have a "content-producing" job where I can telecommute quite frequently. I want to take this freedom and get even more out of it by traveling (in and out of the US) but still being able to work remotely. Sure, I could take a laptop, but I like to travel light and was thinking about tablets. Is the tablet technology of today at the point where I could remote-desktop into a powerful laptop or PC and run powerful software packages (I do a lot of statistical analysis and electromagnetic simulations)? I figure the real computer is doing all the legwork, and you're really just sending pixel information across the internet to the tablet. But what the fuck do I know?

So can I do something like this with a tablet, or should I just stick to netbooks/laptops?

I find remote desktop programs via my tablet to work pretty well as long as you are just viewing information, or viewing files on the primary destkop, or basic copy/paste, or transferring files over a network. If you have to do a lot of input/typing, it's pretty damn tedious with a touchscreen tablet. I'm self employed and I keep my mileage log on my home computer, and I remoted into it to make entries once and it about drove me nuts, and that's just basic spreadsheet entry with a handful of fields/columns/rows. Shit took 10 times as long as when I sit in front of the keyboard at home doing it myself, and that was a pretty simple, basic program.