Well I finally made my decision and I wanted to thank you guys for all the help. I also thought I might share my opinions after spending an entire day going around town (UGH) looking at every tablet available in the brick and mortar stores (DOUBLE UGH!).
I looked at the sub-200 dollar tablets and played around with them. The difference in quality is staggering. It isn't so much the processor speed or anything else, but rather the screens... they are just terrible. That's the sort of thing you can't really tell on the net. The only sub 200 dollar tablet that seemed to be any kind of dela for the money was last year's model CRUZ tablet at Big Lots for 89 bucks. I wouldn't reccommend it, it's a tad on the cheap side and there is a newer model that has roughly double the specs for 150 bucks but hey... it's really cheap.
I also looked at the 250+ dollar tablets. I've gotta say, I wasn't all that impressed. Sure they were SLIGHTLY mroe responsive than the cheaper ones, but because most of your apps are designed for cell phones anyway, so it's kind of like using a high end computer to play angry birds. Now that might change in a year or so, but much like computers in a year or so you'll probably be looking for a new tablet anyway if you are into that sort of thing.
Anyway, the three that kept standing out in terms of bang for your buck were the nook color, the kindle fire and the realitively new Vizio 8" tablet. The Nook was the most boring tablet I've ever seen. Mind you it was well priced (200-250) and was snappy, but the screen was bleh the case made it feel like a cheap toy and that missing corner just looked awful to me. The kindle fire was easily the snappiest thing in that price range. The screen was slighty better than the other two as well. Unfortuantely it has to be, because it's the size of a postage stamp. I've got a e-ink kobo at home and due to it's 4:3 ratio, it even has a bigger screen than the kindle. Also the extra hardware is a bit lacking due to the fact that it's a e-reader. No gps, no bluetooth, no hdmi out and more importantly the memory isn't expandable, so if you intend to put a lot of stuff on it you better be willing to "go to the cloud".
The clear winner for me, once I go the thing in my hand, was the vizio tablet. It's unique hardware features make it feel the least like a glorified smart phone, and that includes some of the pricer ones as well. First off it's 200 bucks. Try to find another tablet with it's specs for that price without having to deal with some kind of crazy sale. Secondly the screen is 4:3 and it's 8 inch, not 7. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but the extra inch coupled with a bigger aspect ratio gives you a much better screen than pretyt much anything out there save the 10 inch tablets. The kindle fire looked like a toy beside it. Also it's 1024x768 resolution, so that's nice and crisp for web browsing and the like. I believe that's the resolution of the ipad.
This one's got a ton of features that you just don't see in that price range so rather than bore you with anther long paragraph, how about a list:
1. Built in bluetooth, so it's OnLive ready.
2. Gps
3. Accelerometer
4. Capacitive multi-touch display
5. Capacitive buttons that appear in either orientation.
6. Custom skin for android 2.3, which I prefer, but hey they've managed to root it anyway.
7. A working usb port (used for charging as well)
8. Hdmi out, probably the best in any class from what I've seen. The tablet is capable of a full 1080p video playback and android is only supposed to supprot 720p.
9. Three speakers, so regardless of the orientation you have stereo sound (which is actually quite good for a tablet).
10. The headphone jack is in the bottom corner instead of along a side, which sounds dumb until you realize that it is actually pretty clever... if you have headphones in and you need to rotate the tablet, it won't pull on the cord.
11. A forward facing web cam, which kind of sucks, but is servicable for skype and the like.
12. A built in IR-Blaster with a custom Vizio universal remote app. It's a little light on the features now, but even as is it's pretty bad ass and on par with a lot of the expensive touch screen remotes out there. Couple that with access to tv guide and imdb and you've basically got a pretty special universal remote. So even if you outgrow the tablet later on, it's still worth the money as a remote alone.
Final notes... in terms of speed it was slightly slower than the kindle fire in terms of the interface, but once you got into the apps it actually performed better than some of the 300 dollar tablets. I've been told that this is due to vizio's custom skin (I know their interface is slow on my tv as well) so if it annoys you too much you can just root it and put standard android back on there. I think it's got one of those ghz class processors in there and 512 mb of ram. It's not a powerhouse or anything but what I found out today was the specs aren't as important on these devices as is their implementation. There were some dual core tablets that didn't seem to perform any better than this one.
So anybody who's in the same boat as me (cheap as hell) I would highly reccomend the vizio. Here's a random review off the net for more info.
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Topic: Opinions on Android 2.0 tablets? (Read 7394 times)
