On 01/22/17 11:26, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: Michael Galea via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
| Does anyone own an NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet K1 and can they recommend it? I am | looking for a recommendation of this tablet for the purpose of web and email. | I have heard that it being a gaming tablet with four cores at 2.2 Ghz, it | should be overkill for the intended use. But that is just what I want. | If anyone knows of a better android based tablet, please let me know.
There are Android tablets for all tastes and needs. You have to figure out what matters to you. That's not actually easy. I found out by living with a few tablets for some time.
The rest of this is about my impressions. Others may feel differently.
I imagine that I would find it intolerable to use a tablet without a keyboard for routine email.
I do find tablet keyboards not very good: if you want a keyboard on a portable device, it is hard to beat the clamshell laptop form-factor. Even tablets that imitate the clamshell get it wrong: either a fixed angle or too much of the weight behind the screen (balance problems).
For web browsing, I find a tablet very nice. I can lounge in a way that you cannot do with a clamshell. For browsing, I love my Nexus 10 (light, high-res screen, longish battery life, no fan noise).
I have two convertible laptops that can fold up to be like a tablet. I never use that feature. Why?
- conventional Linux distros (I use Fedora) don't handle tablet gestures usefully.
- when folded up, these things still have fans
- they still weigh the same, much more than a tablet
- on one (Yoga 2 Pro), the keyboard remains exposed on the underside. That just feels weird. And Linux leaves it enabled (last I checked).
- battery life is much shorter than a tablet
Large tablets are nice to use. Small ones are nicer to carry. I never take my 10" tablet out of the house. My Android phone does most tabletty things when I'm out and about. If I need somthing better, I take a notebook computer. There doesn't seem to be a sufficient niche for something between the phone and a notebook when on the road.
I have a few smaller tablets that I don't use. Some run Windows. I intended to put Linux on those but that's probably silly.
Tablets have limited lifetimes. The manufacturers soon get tired of releasing updated firmware. You can decide how much that matters. I have an original iPad and never turn it on because it has been unsupportd for so long. The Nexus 10 has been unsupported for Andoid 6, but it is still fine for now. You can get a Kobo Arc 10HD tablet with great specs for about $100 but its firmware is uncomfortably old (there is a CyanogenMod for it but not well debugged).
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Cheap Windows tablets often have resource limitations that are unreasonable. 1G of RAM is too little. 16G of eMMC is too little; even 32G is tight but anything more bumps the licensing cost a lot. 1280x800 resolution is not great these days. To top that off, Windows isn't that useful as a tablet OS (but it is better than a conventional Linux distro).
(I have a tablet with 64-bit Windows. It can run the Ubuntu-under-Windows thing that Microsoft has released. 32-bit Windows (used in many tablets even though the processors can run 64-bit code) cannot do that. But so far I hardly ever use that tablet.)
Tablet screens are typically better than notebook screens until you pay a lot for the notebook. I find this annoying and unreasonable. IPS is almost universal in tablets and rare in inexpensive notebooks. Way too many notebooks are only 1366x768. The Nexus 10 and Kobo Arc 10HD have 2560x1600 pixels -- roughly four times as many. The Nexus 7 and Kobo Arc 7HD have 1920x1200.
I don't do gaming. It seems that a lot of games are now targetted at phones and tablets. The nVidia Shield is probably the best gaming tablet but I am not a good source for this. nVidia has a Toronto office that was once Transgaming and it concentrates on porting games to the Shield. (Transgaming started out porting games to Linux, then MacOS; no longer.) But then perhaps I'm confusing the Shield tablet with the Shield Set Top Box. I don't know the relationship and am not about to research it. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHIELD_Android_TV> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_Tablet>
The Shield Tablet is perhaps reaching the end of life. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_Tablet>
In August 2016, Nvidia announced it had cancelled plans to release a hardware upgrade to its Shield Tablet product line - a speculated reason for the cancellation was product conflict with the Nintendo Switch, which uses similar technology.[4] --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
I enjoy using our Kobo ARC even without a keyboard. My beefs are that I want a bigger display and snappier web page rendering. Also my wife and I both use the beast, and account switching gets to be a pain. Our prime applications under Android are web browsing, email from our domains imap and mpdroid (for running our pi-based mpd server that pumps hdmi to the media center). email: My wife has much better ways to draft and view more complex emails on a slow to boot computer, but she uses the Kobo to say yes to acting gigs (as an extra). When a casting call goes out via email, the first responders usually get the job. So she likes the Kobo's sub-30 second trip into the mail app, where she can seize the prize. I real question is, will web pages render faster on a faster tablet? If most of the time to render a page is fetching the page and not tab creation + rendering, then I would probably go for a bigger android tablet. PS: I wish Canada Computers would take one out of the box for me to try but they don't display that unit, just stock it. -- Michael Galea