Sunday, September 30, 2012

Finding My Perfect Tablet



After more than 2 months of lackadaisical searching, followed by 2 weeks of in-depth research of  going  spec by spec, price and side by side comparisons, judging the aesthetics and reading tons of reviews  I’ve finally decided on the Asus TransformerPad TF300 which didn’t even hit the radar to be honest. 

 
The five top contenders were:
Tablet
Prices
Review Link
Samsung Note 10.1  
549 32GB
Toshiba Thrive 10.1
 448 32GB (Amazon)
Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9
 459 32GB (Amazon)
Toshiba Excite 7.7
 399 16 GB
Samsung Galaxy 2 7.0
 249 16 GB
  Unless stated prices are from Best Buy and are current as of 10/1/12 and the reviews are from CNET

     There are numerous reasons which will be addressed, but to be very honest the price of the 32 GB unit at present is 399.00 at Best Buy(BB) , both online as well as Brick and Mortar(B&M). Now online there seems to be a free 20.00 gift card that is mailed out. I’m not quite sure how they are going to handle that one in store. In my local store I’m quite well known, so if there is a way possible for it to be done, it will happen. Not to mention I have some reward zone bucks I need to use as well as a Kindle Fire 1st Edition (KF) that the trade in value is 75.00 given to you immediately. Which for me brings it down to under 300.00 for the 32 GB Model. They have also promised to price match (PM) provided the B&M store is within 25 miles, said tablet is in stock and the price isn’t online only.  The loquacious Evan that I spoke to in my local store was great enough to verify the trade in amount was correct as well as clarify the PM info me. However my original call was to see if they had the Galaxy Tab 8.9 which I had narrowed to as choice three. 
    After a bit of chatting about the various tablets he said the worst thing to me: why not just get an iPad, now I'm not truly a virulent hater of Apple products and in another post I'll go into detail why. My response to him was that I called and asked you about not what the best tablet, or rather the PR as the best tablet, but the best ANDROID tablet for what I need to do. Which is pretty simple, for school I use e-texts exclusively and while I can access them on my phone (LG Nitro) and my KF, the phone was too small and the KF was limited from getting the apps I needed in addition my texts and the processor was quite lacking. I explained that I was extremely enamored of the ability of the Note 10.1 off taking notes in class and having them become and editable document. He quickly jumped on board and gave me quite the sales job on the Sony Experia, to which I replied was not the form factor I was looking for. He then told me that with several different apps on the Play market I can emulate the note taking goodness of the note and pretty much any stylus would work. ( That will be tested and reported in a later post) So after his conversation and realizing that I actually had a little over a 100.00 more that I could spend based on my budget So I began with yet another bout of searching and comparing on tablets that I could previously not afford.


And here’s a link to the gallery of so much yummy all it was missing was bacon.

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