Recommendations for a tablet

peggy

Well-Known Forumite
I'm following this thread with interest. my 8yr old has asked for a kindle fire hd (his sister has one) and has saved up birthday and pocket money, however some of these other tablets sound a good idea.
 

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
Does he need the amazon aspect of the tablet? If not get a nexus 7, much more powerful and futureproof as google use it as a flagship model.
 

bpelectric

Well-Known Forumite
I'm following this thread with interest. my 8yr old has asked for a kindle fire hd (his sister has one) and has saved up birthday and pocket money, however some of these other tablets sound a good idea.
I was looking at the Kindle range in Tesco on Sat, the fire HD seems to have a lot of the apps on board that my phone has.
 

bpelectric

Well-Known Forumite
While Im on I've been looking for yrs now but cant find a Tablet that will do what i need,thats work with office docs every time i ask the question all i get is blank stares from the sales staff. Will android systems with the aid of an app allow this as i cant seem to find one. And lugging a laptop round all day can be a pain in the a....
 

proactive

Enjoying a drop of red.
While Im on I've been looking for yrs now but cant find a Tablet that will do what i need,thats work with office docs every time i ask the question all i get is blank stares from the sales staff. Will android systems with the aid of an app allow this as i cant seem to find one. And lugging a laptop round all day can be a pain in the a....
I use Quickoffice Pro on both Android and iPad and also Officesuite on Android. Officesuite is marginally the best and seamlessly works with Word, Exel and Powerpoint documents, either editing existing ones or creating new ones.

They're all available on the Play Store or pm me your email and I'll send you the apk files.
 

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
oh bpelectric, she loves it!

May I ask what she loves about it? As I said earlier, the kindle fire HD is just a slower nexus 7 with a software overlay. It depends if you need the amazon ecosystem (god I hate that word!) or are happy with plain android.
 

peggy

Well-Known Forumite
shes in bed now but i think if i were to ask her to list her favourite bits she would possibly say that she can read, email, play games and take photos. however, this is her first tablet type thingy, so she/we have little experience of others that are out there. As far as androids and ecosystems go...youve lost me, I am hopeless with anything technical.
 

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
Both the Kindle fire hd and the nexus 7 are android tablets, android is the operating system (like windows is on a pc). The Kindle however has some more software installed on top to make it act differently. This software ties it to amazon, in particular the amazon marketplace instead of the Google one. Essentially this means your choice of what you can install, and what you will pay, will be different between the two tablets.

Without trying the 2 it's hard to explain, but the nexus 7 is like a big android phone. It's kind of shipped bare and you install what you want. The amazon offering has more stuff preset, a bit like apple devices where you are told what to use and it is already installed.
 

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
Just took delivery of 10 new Nexus 7s at work, I'm going to get people off those damn ipads if it kills me!

One think to note about the nexus 7 though is that it has no rear camera, if that is something you need. Full specs are here, specs for the kindle fire HD are here. Forgot with the kindle you have to pay a tenner to turn off the adverts on your lock screen too.

EDIT: Bit of a comparison here: http://www.itpro.co.uk/644380/google-nexus-7-vs-amazon-kindle-fire-hd-head-to-head-review
 

db

#chaplife
just an update to this:

the only tablet i've used to any extent is the ipad, which i would recommend to anyone and think is well worth the money, so i'm probably not much use in this thread - but i just thought i'd pitch in to say that my mum (who is well into her 60s) used a friend's amazon kindle fire a couple of weeks ago and absolutely loved it, and is looking to buy one now..

she had never used an ipad/any kind of tablet before, and just picked it up and figured out the kindle straight away.. she was using skype and all sorts.. so if my ol' dear can just pick one up and use it, they must be pretty user-friendly, i reckons!

well, my mum's birthday has been and gone, and she's had her kindle fire hd for a couple of weeks now.. she likes it ok, but having used it briefly i can't say i would be in a hurry to recommend one to anyone..

the screen is too small for anything other than holding it right in front of your face imo, so things such as using it as a recipe book, watching iplayer from a distance, etc. aren't much good.. i'm sure people will disagree and say they love the size, but i guess i'm just used to a bigger screen - whilst the kindle fire hd looks good at arm's length, it's too small to glance at from across the kitchen as i do with the ipad..

and on the subject of recipes - my mum really wanted the BBC Good Food app, after seeing it on my ipad, but when i downloaded it for the kindle it wasn't an app at all - just a kind of 'stub' that tried to get you to subscribe to the Good Food e-magazine (at a cost, natch)..

the notifications aren't very good.. if my mum gets an email/message/etc. you would expect something to pop up on screen to let you know, but unfortunately this isn't the case.. it makes a vague noise to signal something requires your attention, but the only visual notification is a tiny number appearing in the status bar along the top of the screen.. i have sent her two emails since she's had the device, and both times i have had to email my dad to ask her to check her emails, because she didn't know she had any! perhaps i'm just missing an option, but i went through all the menus and couldn't find a way to enable some kind of visual notification/pop-up/etc..

in summary, i wouldn't recommend a kindle fire hd for the following reasons:

  • screen too small for anything other than use at arm's length.
  • no visual notifications - too easy to miss things.
  • poor user interface - has a scrolling cover flow style "carousel", rather than just a simple page with icons for each app, which makes it hard to quickly find what you want.
  • scrolling doesn't seem to act as expected - a few times i couldn't get it to scroll up or down, and had to press the screen in various different places until i found a spot that worked.
  • no rear camera - i assumed all devices had cameras these days, since they are so cheap that even the most basic phones have them, but apparently that isn't the case. cue people saying "it's a tablet, not a camera!" - true, but how many people do you see taking photos on their ipad? i do, all the time, because i like the way it embeds GPS data, etc.. plus it's nice to be able to switch camera when skyping, so that you can show the other person something you're looking at without having to turn the device around, not to mention that rear mounted cameras are usually much higher resolution than the cuffy front-mounted one on the kindle fire.

as i say, that is just my experience from using it for an hour or so at the weekend, and the only device i have to compare it to really is my ipad, so perhaps i was expecting too much!
 

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
On the GPS photo thingy, doesn't your phone do that? I always find it hysterical watching people holding a 10" tablet up to take a photo, always wondered why they didn't use their phones when even the latest ipad camera is still only 5Mp - something phones have had for 2 years or so at least.

EDIT: Just looked on mine and in the camera settings is a GPS tag option.
EDIT2: Thats android BTW, Samsung S3 using the stock camera.
 

db

#chaplife
On the GPS photo thingy, doesn't your phone do that?

possibly, but my phone (htc sensation) is so clunky and shit that i do everything i possibly can to avoid using it these days..

I always find it hysterical watching people holding a 10" tablet up to take a photo,

i agree, and i wouldn't dream of using my ipad as my main camera (e.g. i would use my phone to take photos on holiday/out at an event/etc.) - but if i'm indoors or happen to have it on me, i would definitely use it over my phone, as it is easier to get a stable picture, quicker to operate, has larger buttons/controls, easier to manipulate the resulting image, etc.

regardless, as i say the reasons for having a rear mounted camera are more skype-based - my parents are at that age where grandkids are popping up everywhere, and so they love skyping people to show them off, and a rear mounted camera means you can do this at the touch of a button, and turn the tablet into a kind of video camera..
 
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