tablet - Tag Archive

Which tablet works best for you?

23 Replies mariana

With the holidays fast approaching, tech companies are readying new products to woo people looking for the latest hot item in the tech industry. Games consoles, flat screens, and smartphones have had their time in the sun as popular holiday purchases, but this year belongs to the tablet.

Apple dominated the tablet market last holiday season with the introduction of their revolutionary iPad, a wild success with consumers. Since then competitors have tried to emulate the magic of the iPad in an effort to cash in on the new tablet market, but to little avail: HP’s tablet failed to impress consumers, while Motorola’s Xoom tablet has struggled to establish a solid consumer base since its release in January.

But Apple now has two serious contenders to face in the tablet arena: Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet. Amazon and Barnes & Noble, are both wildly successful companies in their own right, are looking to transform the popularity of their digital reading devices into sleek, user-friendly tablets. Now that there are at least three viable tablets to choose from, it’s time to determine which would be the best buy for the holiday season.

Price

We can separate the tablets from each other right from the beginning by looking at their price ranges. The Apple iPad 2 starts at $499, while the Kindle Fire Starts at $199 and the Nook Tablet is priced at $249. Now the disparate prices may be enough to determine a consumer’s purchase; the $300 price gap between the Kindle Fire and iPad 2, for instance, will likely drive many consumers to choose the cheaper tablet.

An iPad 2

An iPad 2 showing off how ‘amazingly thin’ it is

But of course these tablets are priced according to their features. The Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are much closer in price, and analysts expect that consumers will transfer their digital reader loyalties to the tablets — Kindle users will go to the Kindle Fire and Nook users will likely follow suit with the Nook Tablet. Both tablets will be optimal for digital reading, web browsing, and multimedia functions.

Part of Nook’s more expensive price tag can be attributed to the better hardware: the Nook Tablet has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, compared to the 512MB of RAM and 8GB of storage on the Kindle Fire.

While the iPad 2 stands as the most expensive tablet on the market, it also boasts more attractive components than either other tablet. With a larger screen (9.7 inch), built-in 3G, and access to hundreds of thousands of apps from the Apple store, the iPad 2 certainly offers a host of features that would make any tablet competitor blush. Is it expensive? Yes. Do you get what you pay for? Yes.

Stand-Out Features

There are certainly stand-out features to consider with every tablet. The Kindle Fire may not have the hardware on par with the other two tablets, it will have optimized internet usage through Amazon’s cloud service based browser, Silk. In theory Silk will allow the user to perform multiple functions online at once without overburdening the tablet because part of the computing power will be done via Amazon’s cloud system. The Kindle Fire also has the Amazon name in its favor, one of the most trusted names in online retail.

The Nook Tablet has the distinct advantage of being sold at brick and mortar Barnes & Noble stores. A consumer can walk into a store and purchase a Nook Tablet on a whim, something that the Kindle Fire simply can’t compare to.

Barnes & Noble have also hinted at creating spaces similar to Apple’s genius bar, built solely for the maintaining and assistance for all things Nook related. If there’s any credence to that rumor, it could help jettison the Nook Tablet to the top of the market.

As for the iPad 2, its standout feature is simple: it’s an Apple product. The brand loyalty alone has driven millions to purchase the tablet, regardless of the high price tag. But it remains to be seen if Apple will continue to charm potential tablet users in the face of these newly minted tablets from its competitors.

Windows 8 is on the way!

27 Replies Christopher Roberts

I have recently upgraded to Windows 7, which is why I kind of wasn’t that pleased when Microsoft announced (early last week) that it was getting set to launch its next operating system, Windows 8, some time next year – probably around April.


At the Build developers’ conference in California, Microsoft unveiled the new operating system, (no doubt still in early beta stages) and gave us a sneak peak at to what is in store in the next version of Windows.

They stated that the core foundation of Windows 8 was Windows 7, but better! To quote Steven Sinofsky exactly, he said:

…everything that was great about windows 7, well we took that and we made it even better in Windowws 8!

Despite saying this, this version of Windows OS looks like it has had a dramatic overall.

Windows is currently under more pressure than ever before in its long, domineering history. In the past the cheap, affordable and compatible OS, always used to be Microsoft’s Windows. Now however Apple are putting increasing pressure on Windows, along with Google’s new attempt to bring down the giant of Windows in the form of Chrome OS.

Hence why Windows 8 seems to be dramatically different to all previous versions of Windows.

So what is going to be different? Well for starters, for the first time ever, a Windows OS will be compatible with low power ARM-designed processors.

Also, from the glimpses and comments that Microsoft have currently given us/made, it looks like Microsoft are attempting to make Windows a more ‘family friendly’ operating system, in that it’s more of a media based OS. This is probably done to try and steer away from the classical view of Windows in that it is an operating system designed primarily for spreadsheets, documents and other work/business related tasks.

Windows 8 Start Screen

A glimpse at the probably new start screen design for Windows 8

In addition to this, Windows 8 will support touchscreen devices, possible Microsoft’s way of saying “get ready for Windows Tablet guys!” who knows.

Microsoft knows that it has to pull something pretty special out of the bag this time, or it could seriously loose its foot in the computing market, not only due to the increased competition, but also because users are slowly moving away from desktops and laptops, and towards smart phones and tablets.

That’s pretty much all the information I have at the moment, however no doubt we will have loads of updates on Technology Bloggers for you, as soon as we find out more about this new OS 🙂

What do you think and hope for with Windows 8? Do you speculate that it will be another Vista – i.e. slow and laggy, incompatible, riddle with bugs, and hated by many tech gurus, or will it be like Vista to 7, a breath of fresh air?

Desktop Computers Destined for the Scrapheap?

14 Replies AlexS

The IBM Personal Computer (PC) was thirty years old last Friday, and according to those in the know, it might not be around for much longer. A blog post by Dr Mark Dean, one of IBM’s longest serving and most respected computer designers (who helped build the classic IBM 5150) has been making big waves across the technology sector after he claimed that the PC was heading in the same direction as vinyl records and the typewriter, light bulbs and the vacuum tube.

Dr Dean points out that PC’s and cheap laptops have had their time and place but that now they have helped to create a world which needs a new type of device depending on use and form.

Claiming that he himself has moved beyond the PC and only works on a tablet, he notes that PC’s will still be around a while longer but that “they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing.”

He goes on to say that it will not only be tablets and phones that cause the demise of PC’s but also a change of mindset about the place of computing in society and the progress of man. Instead of being about computing they are now a way of facilitating innovation not on the devices themselves, but “in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact.”

When IBM released the 5150 in 1981 it soon set the standard for how PC’s were to look and operate. The computer, which had a massive 16k of ram and cost more than $1,500 was one of the computers that began the ‘PC Era’, that revolutionized the way we work and live.

An IBM 5150 PC

An IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150)

According to Dean, such a revolution is also underway once again. He is not alone – in another blog about the 30th anniversary of the PC, Microsoft’s Frank Shaw argued that the proliferation of tablets, phones and other such devices was the beginning of a new ‘PC Plus Era’, if not necessarily an indication of the end of the PC and traditional computer devices.

So what do you think? Are you ready to ditch that PC just yet?