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Ask Slashdot: Why Do Most Tablet Specs Suck?
Slashdot reader Qbertino describes himself as a "happy tablet user," moving from an old HTC Flyer to his Yoga 2. But he notes that most other tablets "have laughable battery times," and "I've yet to find a tablet that does not give me storage or memory problems in some way or other, lasts for a day or two in power and doesn't feel chintzy and like it won't stand a month of regular everyday use and carrying around..." He asks why none of the manufacturers seem willing to offer more than one gigabyte of RAM -- and why they're so stingy with storage. "Where is the rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet?"
So leave your educated opinions in the comments. What are your thoughts on the current tablet market? And are they the ultimate all-purpose "convergence" device that Apple and Ubuntu seem to think they are?
So leave your educated opinions in the comments. What are your thoughts on the current tablet market? And are they the ultimate all-purpose "convergence" device that Apple and Ubuntu seem to think they are?
More RAM less battery life
apparently these days cheap is all that matters - quality doesn't
8"
1920*1200
around 8-10 h SoT
3 GB RAM
32 GB storage
front speakers
review and specs:
http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_z3_tablet_compact-6633.php
Because the business model of a number of tablet makers is giving you little on-device storage so that you start using their cloud storage service, which gives them an opportunity to sell you an additional service or sell your data to advertisers, duh.
Why Do Most Tablet Specs Suck?
No fucking idea about tablets. I use caplets and gel caps myself.
Maybe try rectal administration?
Most pundits decry Apple for not making the iPad a convergence device. The tablet condenses nearly every hard problem in making computers - big, high-res displays take more memory and compute to drive. Memory takes battery to drive. Battery weighs a lot. Nobody wants to carry that weight. Every tablet is a compromise - no matter what MS tries to tell you.
Try checking out the Memopad 572c. 2 GB RAM, a fantastic screen, supports SD cards, and a really high performing chip with ~ 10 hour battery life, all for less than $199. It's not made anymore, can only get up to Android 5 at the moment, and won't take on the full size ipad, but for what you get it's a fantastic deal, if you can still find it. A decent $199 tablet seems to be a lost art these days :/
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
I have the same setup and very happy!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
In fairy land with the unicorns and super-dense LiPo batteries that don't explode when you sneeze really hard.
Because what do you need in order to power 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD??? Lots of power. Which don't exist in batteries with the density required at prices that are affordable.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Here.
Not even a LMGTFY.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
RAM: the more you want the more power it uses. Every one of those bits in RAM being used or not needs that charge to keep its state.
CPU/GPU: the faster the more power it uses. Every tick is a pulse of electricity
Video: The higher the resolution the more RAM and CPU/GPU needed.
Now what happens to this power once the calculation is done. Most of it becomes heat. Excess heat from these devices can damage components in the table. As well damage your body as well.
Then we have battery life. Battery storage capacity has been improving linearly, while computing power has been growing exponentially. So while the computer components get smaller leaving more room for battery, however it will rarely allow doubling the power capability.
Your Desktop PC can have loads of performance as you can burn energy right off the grid, filled with big empty spaces for heat dissipation
Your Laptop PC has less space and weight, however due to the space needed to type on a keyboard they are allowed much more room for battery power, as well some air pathways to keep the device cool.
Tablets are self contained computing devices. with nearly 0 room to spare. So any components are often underpowered or under clocked to keep heat down and extend battery life.
Normally this is a good tradeoff as they are normally just browsing web pages, or running simple apps. or more complex apps off of the could.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Seriously, I work in I.T. for a company with a highly mobile workforce, and we're both Mac and Windows friendly on top of that. So our environment is mixed, with a lot of emphasis on trying out various portable options and cloud offerings, while still supporting some traditional server "back end" for our financial system and shared network drives.
Long ago, we switched all of our users from desktop systems to laptops, and we had a policy of issuing corporate iPads ever since the iPad 2 came along. (For a long time, we had a division of our company doing iOS software development - so it made sense to issue hardware to run the stuff we made.)
Right now, we're starting to issue the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 to new hires who request a Windows PC instead of a Mac. And that brings up the question of whether its time to stop issuing iPads - if the Surface Pro is supposed to double as a tablet.
What we're seeing though is that generally no, the "one solution fits all" model is a big compromise and doesn't really work that well. Out of all of the different computers we've issued over the years, from HP Elitebooks to various Dell machines to different Macbooks -- the only one that's held up over the years as the "gold standard" that users really liked AND worked reliably was the Macbook Air 13". It's light and thin enough so people can throw it in a backpack or whatnot and take it with them without a care. Battery life is great. It's about half the price of the high end Macbook Pro laptops. The basic look stayed the same from the first year of production through current models - meaning there's no stigma about someone pulling out and opening an older 2011 or 2012 model in a meeting with clients. And repairs are pretty reasonably priced. (With Apple doing a "flat rate" repair program on them, you can have one with 5 or 6 things wrong with it and it's still cost effective to have it serviced rather than trash it.)
With the Surface Pro 4, by contrast? Yes, people think things like the pencil are cool, and it's a very capable machine when plugged into a dock and used like a desktop. But as soon as you take it with you to use like an iPad, you run into a lot of downsides. Battery life NOT so great, for starters. And because it runs a full Windows 10 OS, it has the inherent problems that come with a full blown, more complex OS. Issues not always waking from sleep properly, for example -- leading to a long wait to reboot the whole thing, or apps that aren't designed for the hi-res 4K display so fonts display so tiny, they're unreadable. The keyboard cover is too flimsy to allow typing on it like laptop if you actually have to use it in your lap. (It's designed assuming you have a solid surface like a table underneath the whole thing.) Lastly, I think it's a big omission that you can't buy a Surface Pro 4 with a built-in LTE cellular modem like you can an iPad. Having a cellular data plan on the devices goes a LONG way towards feeling "always connected" and ensuring your cloud-based data or apps are always available "on the go".
If it could have something to do with the fact that more ram, more cpu, more storage increase power usage, heat production, and weight. And more battery life means more weight.
I'm not sure there is a very large market for heavy tablets that melt your fingers. Though gaming laptops exist so I'm probably wrong...
It's the same reason why 1366x768 laptop displays aren't going away. There's a huge supply of them, they work, and they're cheap.
Guangdong and Shenzhen are mass producing cheap and common tablet parts like mad. You can find and buy them yourself on Alibaba; there's tons of cheap 8 and 16GB eMMC chips, 1GB RAM chips, and ARM processors. Companies like Samsung make higher quality and newer, pioneering products, like chips that integrate the storage & RAM together. Soon, the Chinese generics will add these to their lineup, making tablets even smaller and cheaper.
If you want something different, vote with your wallet and buy something different. Then, if enough people do, that's what will become cheap and mass-produced.
A tablet camera must be barely acceptable.
A tablet with a pen must be updated rarely.
Android cannot be upgraded; You are allowed only one newer version or 2 years, whichever comes first.
A tablet cannot have removable main storage.
A tablet must use expensive MicroSD even if there is room for a full sized SD card.
The number of SD cards must only be 1.
Android must not be vanilla; it must be larded with crap so updates come slow.
Early Apple updates must break your device.
The tablet screen must be so shinny that you cannot use it outside.
You may not put a volume knob on anything.
Tablet must all look the same.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I have yet to come up with a reason why I would want a tablet.
Tablets are meant for consumption, not production. Touchscreens are a regression in human interfaces: sloppy, imprecise, immediately unintuitive kludges for meta input. Tablets are one side of a power grab by the industry because PCs offer too much freedom, privacy and repairability; the other side is app markets and cloud services. Tablets are too convenient; to achieve that they must sacrifice any spec based on volume: battery capacity, storage, RAM, cooling, etc. Except screen size... gotta keep packing more pixels.
The really good tablets come with keyboards attached...
A lot of companies that make Android tablets over-estimated the market size and rushed to marked with less than stellar devices. Then the market turned out to be a lot smaller and a lot more crowded than most of them had predicted. So they stopped investing in Android tablet hardware development. I think most of the Android tablets that you seen on store shelves now are probably basically 2012 models with some slight modifications. Of course they're under-powered compared to smartphones from 2015 and 2016 that have much more RAM and more powerful CPU:s.
Some exceptions:
Lenovo's new models. Their screens are not great, but they're okay for indoor use.
The Nvidia Shield K1.
Samsung's high end models, if you want to spend iPad-levels of cash on an Android tablet.
> "Where is the rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet?"
I think the submitter might be happier looking under a different category in Newegg. Newegg has 26 options with 8-16GB of RAM, and 256GB-1TB storage. Most products with that much RAM and storage ALSO come with a detachable or fold-away keyboard, so they are listed in the "2 in 1" category.
I was shocked when I saw how much CPU scripts take on many websites. Even an 3 GHz i5 can get 75% loaded. Small wonder the little tablet ARMs get overwhelmed. Also seriously missing is [mini/micro] HDMI output on nearly all.
You're buying the wrong devices.
Maybe you should look here: http://computers.amrel.com/rug...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Tablets, with enough resources, and an intelligently designed GUI and intelligently designed apps, could really revolutionize content creation. We have the technology now to do this. But it's not done because of the perception that tablets are only for media consumption.
But it's not just about tablet hardware -- serious applications must become more touch friendly. And by this I do *not* mean clipping the optional $114 keyboard to the tablet in order to do real work.
What I want is the equivalent of an Alienware laptop as a tablet, with an intelligently designed stylus (one like the Galaxy Note would be ok) running an OS intended to actually work full time as a touch OS (not just with touch "features" that require you to break out the keyboard and mouse to do any serious work (so Windows is not at all a consideration)) and a version of the Adobe suite that actually works in a touch environment, not just acts as a way to consume media created on a conventional KVM PC. Then I'd throw out my PC and never look back.
But the argument is that people are using tablets for consumption only, and people are using tablets for consumption only because that's all you can currently use them for.
ex vi termini
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
16GB RAM- Not many people use it on desktops, let alone mobile devices. I would like to see 8GB ones though. 1TB Disk- Flash is just too expensive now. A 1TB M.2 drive, what you probably would be looking at, is $500 or so when I last looked. 20hr battery life- Batteries are heavy. And big. And you'd have to lower other specs.
Most tablets are made by the same peeps who make laptops. If they made the tablet well enough it would eat into their laptop sales and those make them more money. The only company that makes a useful tablet is MS who does not make laptops. Problem is MS is new at this and charges accordingly. Everything else is an experiment and no one wants to invest a lot of cash that would make the tablet useful.
A few years back you could buy a decent name-brand 10" tablet for $300. Toshiba made the Excite 10, Samsung and Sony had direct competitors. Now you start at $500 and up for a name-brand 10" tablet, that is laptop territory.
I love the Excite 10 that I bought, two issues Toshiba no longer updates Android for it and refuses to unlock the bootloader so I can install Cyanogenmod.
>" A Huffington Post article notes that this behavior has contributed significantly in "generating heaps of e-waste." Citing many advocates, the publication claims that Apple has "opposed legislation that could help curb it." "
It is a free market (or it is supposed to be, anyway, mostly). Yes, Apple prices suck. Yes, they do things to lock people in and charge an arm and a leg to keep people from fixing things.
AND YOU ARE FREE TO NOT BUY APPLE PRODUCTS. We don't need "legislation", we need INFORMATION. Want to stop Apple from doing this? STOP BUYING THEIR PRODUCTS. Inform your friends and family what it REALLY costs (total cost ownership) when you buy something you can't get fixed. Post articles about it online. Write reviews. Send a letter to Apple. Do something productive, other than complaining to legislators.
Magically, most consumers are not total idiots.... if they know the information before a purchase, it is likely to shape their decisions. The market will respond. Competitors will shape products to address the demands. Apple will be forced to deal with the backlash or lose sales.
And if you think Apple is a monopoly and there are no other excellent products in every category in which they sell, you have your head in the sand and are buying Apple products as a fashion statement. If that is what you want to do, fine, but stop complaining about it. Yeesh.
Yes, there are people, like me, who will pay for a high-end tablet. But people like me are a minority. People clobbered by their economic situation don't have "extra" money to spend on high-end tablets. They spend what they can afford and have to budget their money. I purchased an original iPad on the first day but most people bought Amazon Fire tablets from what I have seen locally. Most people who stretch to buy an iPad keep them for longer periods of time or wait until they can afford a used iPad. (I gather this from Craigslist, etc. postings. There is still a market for the first iPad because the price point for used has reached the general populace.)
I was lucky enough to find a lightly-used Surface Pro 3 (i7, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD storage) with 2 pens, keyboard (or whatever Microsoft call it) and full-sized dock for less than half price. With a 128 GB micro-SD card, it gives me 4-6 hours of battery to do the 'serious' stuff which, in my case, is photo processing (Lightroom 4,ON1 Photo 10, Photoshop Elements) and music making (Presonus Studio One, Ableton Live 9.5, Komplete 10, etc). Plenty for my needs, and it slips into the skinny laptop compartment of my rucksack with room to spare. (It actually also fits into the map pocket of my gilet, but that's another story). Also in my rucksack is a small, lightweight Bluetooth mouse for when the pen and/or keyboard aren't enough - it doesn't get a lot of use.
In my pocket is an 8" Acer Windows tablet which also gives me 4-6 hours of 'consumption', including G+, Twitter, web browsing, maps, train and other transit times, magazine and book reading, etc, etc. It has 32 GB of storage space (plus a 64 GB micro-SD card) and 1 GB of RAM. As it's an 8" device, it runs full Windows 10 desktop.
Out and about, they connect to the net (and so to OneDrive, Dropbox, etc) via my 10 GB per month 4G to WiFi dongle. At home, they're on the same Workgroup as my PC, so I can drag and drop files between them at LAN (the Surface) or WiFi (the Acer) speeds.
This combination of two tablets serve my needs very well. Perhaps the OP might consider this solution.
Garry Knight
They don't. They're sufficient for their intended purpose when you take into account all the inherent tradeoffs.
You might as well complain that an A10 is slow or an MX5 has poor towing ability.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Where is the rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet?"
My answer would be "That's easy: They're hidden under their battery-packs!".
Seriously. Not every stinkin' thing that has a CPU/MCU/SoC in it is EQUIVALENT!
No matter how the industry tries, they just can't get a computing device with an integrated display, 16GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and under TEN hours of battery life into a package weighing less than about TWO pounds.
And then you want it to be "Rugged", whatever that means...
Fine. But people whine about "too heavy" when a Tablet is barely over HALF of that these days.
WTF, over? I thought people who read Slashdot generally UNDERSTOOD what the current state of technology (especially BATTERY technology) is.
br. Guess not.
Exactly!! Why don't these count? I have a Surface Pro 3 and it has been a complete laptop and desktop replacement for me for a year-and-a half. It has 8 GB of RAM and a 512 GB hard drive. When I'm at work, I plug it into a docking station and I have gigabit Ethernet and 3 displays. Pop it out and I have a tablet with a high-resolution display with pressure-sensitive pen capability and a pretty decent keyboard that doubles as a stand support.
Tablets are not going to do any heavy lifting until they figure out a better battery tech in which to drive all that hardware you are lusting after.
What is the use case for 20 hours? Who want the compromise that would entail?
Q>"have laughable battery times,"...lasts for a day or two in power
A>Have you looked at an iPad or Surface Pro?
Q>won't stand a month of regular everyday use and carrying around..."
A>I've had iPads and a Surface pro for years and they are fine.
Q>He asks why none of the manufacturers seem willing to offer more than one gigabyte of RAM -- and why they're so stingy with storage.
A>Have you looked at a Surface Pro?
Q>"Where is the rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet?"
A>What are you using this device for? Are you really willing to have heavy weight and/or poor performance to get 20 hours of battery life? I'm not - give me a faster lighter tool with 8 hours.
Greed is the root of all evil.
I have to disagree that "all of my complaints are relatively incorrect". I'm glad you haven't experienced issues typing on the MS keyboard cover, but it's a fact that many of our users have. The Surface Pro is designed so it props upright along the edge of the cover, and the cover is a plastic and fabric combo that's slightly flexible. That means if you're sitting on a train or other form of public transportation and it's vibrating/bouncing around, the Surface Pro 4 can't really be held still by the keyboard portion - unlike a laptop with a traditional hinged lid firmly attached to the bottom half of the shell. That doesn't even begin to discuss such questions as why MS feels the need to sell the keyboard cover as an *option* for over $100 on a computer this expensive? Seems to me it should be included, as I've never met anyone who bought a Surface Pro 4 and decided to skip the keyboard cover.
As for the font scaling? Try any of a number of older apps developed using Java 6.... It's typically not compiled to be "scaling aware" (even if Java 6 technically did offer the option to compile source that way). Our Fonality VoIP "HUD" control panel is one such example. On a Surface Pro 4, if you launch it - you can't even see the phone extensions you're trying to click on because it draws them so tiny. There's no way to get Windows 10 to tell the app to draw it larger in proportion to everything else. All you can do is drag it onto a regular (non 4K) external display where it will display properly.
I am sorry OP, but if you want a tablet with 16GB of memory, 1TB of storage, rugged, and a quality screen, then you're going to have to pay the same as for an Ultrabook or tablet with such specs. A Surface Pro 4, comes with about the specs you want, but you gotta pay 2.5K bucks for that.
And in general, I do not get it why people want a tablet with laptop specs. A tablet with laptop specs (e.g. a surface pro 4) ends up being relatively bulky and heavy, and is actually a lousy tablet and a lousy productivity tool.
An ideal application for a tablet is to be a media/information consumption device for the times when using a notebook, or a convertible ultrabook, is less convenient. A small 8-9 inch lightweight tablet is perfect to browse the web or watch a video on a flight or in your bed. But for real productivity work, please do yourself a favor and get a laptop or a convertible ultrabook, like a Lenovo Yoga or similar.
I would settle for a tablet with a replacable battery.
What I'm hearing is "I want to use the keyboard a very specific way that the Surface Keyboard doesn't do" and "I have a problem with Java 6". It's like complaining that the 2 door car you bought doesn't have 4 doors. Why not buy the 4 door car then? I'm saying that I'm very happy with my Surface Pro. The only thing which could make me happier is a better GPU.
That comes in a 16 GB / 1 TB version. It's very expensive though.
Gotta agree there. My nightly routine involves plugging my phone, iPod, iPad and laptop in to charge overnight. If I don't do it nightly, I'll forget about it and one of the above will be out of juice when I'm out and about and need it. And since I'm charging them nightly anyway, I really don't give a damn whether it could theoretically go a week without charging or "only" three days or so.
It's impossible to find a tablet with a high resolution camera or image stabilization. I must buy two devices.
Twinstiq, game news
The point is if you take 8 phones and lay them out next to each other, I'd have the specs he requires.8x2G RAM, 8x128G HD, and all that. And the battery could keep the whole array working for a week on standby, or a few hours at peak usage. So why can't someone put that in a single form factor? It'd meet the specs of at least one person, the guy asking the question.
Learn to love Alaska
One word answer - heat.
:)
A tablet just cannot shed as much heat as a larger device so it's not going to match a gaming rig with huge fans.
It's actually quite amazing that the "low spec" tablets complained about have as much processing power as they have.
We've become the people who if we had a chance at high speed sub-orbital flight would complain about the airline food
I also have a Surface Pro. Actually 2, the 2 and the 3 model, and my girlfriend has the 4. While I agree he bought the wrong device if he's complaining about the keyboard, the inability to do display scaling naively in Windows is a BIG problem. Not a obscure VoIP app no one uses problem, but rather a problem that affects a lot of devices and a lot of the programs running the OS.
Fortunately I am only affected with one program. Photoshop. a premier tool for photo editing and a must have for people the world over supported only 100% and 200% scaling which on the SP3 and SP4 renders them either too small or too big. But that's not where it ends. There are a multitude of problems with the way scaling works in Windows 10 to the point where even Microsoft's own installers can't render correctly. When you're not greeted with super tiny applications you can't read, you get given an upscaled pixellated dialogue which looks like someone is playing a practical joke, and that's before you get applications which render content but pickup the UI scaling in the content but not the application itself resulting in programs with large things in one area and tiny unreadable ones in the other.
Mind you none of this is a Surface specific problem or a convergence device problem, but it's far from some simply complain like "I have problems with Java".
"Where is the rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet?" This product exists and is called the toughbook 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... You might want to re-evaluate your "need" of these features after spotting the price tag...
Take your pick of 2-in-1 devices. Surface Pro, Lenovo Miix 700, Acer Transformer, etc.
Because sticker shock has discrete spectral lines. Nobody ever said humans were rational, although Greenspan put on quite the show concerning where that assumption would take you (the financing model was also innovative: no money down, no giant one-time trillion-dollar payment until your children can legally drink in public).
With the notable exceptions of the Surface Pro (which is better viewed as a hybrid device; they're mostly bought to use with a keyboard, not as a pure tablet) and the iPad line, tablets sell for less than high end phones do. Most of them don't have cellular radios as a cost factor (except for the models with LTE connectivity), but they have big screens and big batteries that cost more than the smaller ones in phones do. Tablets with the specs of a high end phone are scarce because few people want to pay $800 for them.
But yeah, at least offer us 2GB or more RAM on Android tablets. 1GB is painful given the size of present day apps. Installing Facebook and Messenger on a 1GB Android device will bring the poor thing to its figurative knees. Tablets without LTE tend to have fewer apps installed than phones do, so they don't need as much internal memory IF they also have a memory card slot. (Apps mostly have to be in internal memory, but media can happily live on a card.) Tablets are not only more likely to have a slot than phones are, it's also likely to be much easier to get to; some phones require removal of the battery to get to the memory card.
I'm still using a gen-1 iPad. Mind you, I'm not a fan of Apple, loving my LG phone nearly as much as bacon, but I cannot deny that with moderate use, it's battery life can easily be measured in days. Sure, very limited memory, but I don't watch movies on it. When some 3rd party clones a gen1 iPad, hopefully with Android, but with more increased memory/storage/speed, I'll gladly replace it. Manufacturers are afraid of making them "too bulky", "too heavy"... a matter of a single-digit amount of ounces, is not going to hold me back, if it does what I want it to.
With regards to cheap Windows 8/10 devices (tablets & netbooks) Microsoft is to blame. Microsoft limits OEMs to a maximum of 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage in order to purchase reduced price licenses of Windows.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!