TECHNOLOGY - As a geek, where should I invest my cash in the very crowded tablet market?
Before I launch into this, I want to stress that I’m on no-one’s payroll: these are my opinions, based on facts and trends you can’t really ignore. The world has changed and the clear divide between traditional tech winners and the rest has become very blurred. The likes of Nokia and Sony are just not dominating names any more: quite frankly, they don’t make products that people want any more. Even the likes of Hewlett-Packard (HP) have pulled out of tablets after dipping their toe in – a few months ago Argos flogged their entire stock of HP TouchPads on the web for £25 each (yes - £25 each!). At a chip and OS (operating system) level, Intel are having to share the limelight with ARM, and the world still awaits Microsoft to release an operating system designed specifically for touch-screen tablets. Tablets have killed off the netbook market (net-books being those awful micro PCs with a 10-inch or smaller screen), so Microsoft is already very late to the party. Looking at just tablets here, the first thing you notice is that all tablets largely look the same. The key technical parameters usually surround the screen size and memory size. The main difference between them is the operating system, and the three main options are: Blackberry OS, Apple OS and Android OS.
Geek Syndicate
fitting into a handbag or coat pocket. If however, you can get over to the US, then the Kindle Fire is head and shoulders above all. Currently priced at $199 (approximately £130), the Kindle Fire gives you such a robust interface you don’t even realise that it’s Android underneath. The device comes with an audio/video player, apps and games, internet access, email and more. The beauty of Amazon and the Kindle or Kindle Apps on other devices is that it supports transferring all the books you have ever purchased across all the devices you own. Although it does class itself as an e-reader, the Kindle-Fire does the blur the line into main-stream tablet land, especially with respect to our first contender, the Blackberry PlayBook.
Dedicated Reader Devices
I’m guessing that primarily you want a tablet in order to read, yes? But read what? Books? Comics? What formats? PDF? CBR? ePub? Well, at the very base level, you have dedicated e-readers. EReaders are limited to between a 5” and 7” screen and today there is a very wide range of good products available if you want the full colour experience (sorry, I’m not going to waste my time with those monochrome e-ink things!). For the example Nook, Binatone and PocketBook all have offerings priced between £50 and £100 and they all let you read published books in epub or pdf formats. They are compact and perfectly formed, with good screens, good memory (or at least expansion slots for adding memory cards), long battery life and they are very portable: thin and lightweight,
Blackberry Playbook
A week before the Gadget Show Live, RIM (Research in Motion) announced that it was “pulling out of consumer sales, to focus on the corporate market”. What this means in practical terms remains to be seen, but what RIM are effectively saying is: “we can’t compete against Apple and Android in the bigger market space”. In actuality, if you follow the logic, this is the beginning of the end for the Blackberry, much in the same way that companies like NEC, Motorola and No5