Cheap tablet for reading technical PDF books?

[TheFaQQer]

The market filters what you can see based on the device capabilities so even if you can get the market app installed it may not work very well. TBH I'd rather spend the extra money and get something that is going to work properly.

There are alternatives to the official Android marketplace, like AndroidPit which might get round the limitation.

Depending on the licencing deal with Google, you might get partial marketplace, full marketplace or no marketplace. AndyPad annoyed some of their customers last year when an "upgrade" added some functionality but removed the marketplace - I assume this was down to licencing restrictions.

[Vanilla]

Seriously PAH, just get an Asus Transformer/Xoom off ebay instead of faffing around. The market app is very specific to device spec hence my earlier recommendation of the vega since it has the tegra CPU, installing the APK will not work on the elcheapo tablets.

[Churchill]

Hi walking past Maplin they had a 10" Viewsonic for £199 in the window.

10 inch Viewpad 10S Tablet : Tablet PC's : Maplin Electronics

Might be worth checking out. Online seems to be out of stock - but definitely in the shop they had some.


Cheers


Seyre

The Viewsonic 10s is hardware compatible with the Vega and can be loaded with "VegaComb" which should remove the Android Marketplace issues you may have.

[PAH]

Looks like the iPad3 due out in March will have a 2048 x 1536 screen to go with the quad core processor:

Apple will not kill iPad 2 at iPad 3 debut ? reghardware

Hopefully text scaling is pretty good or it will be unreadable if you're surfing websites with fixed pixel sizes. Reported to make images look like printed material though.

The other interesting thing is it appears they'll be selling the iPad3 alongside the iPad2 for some time, so may drop the price of the iPad2 significantly, which may have a knock on effect with their competitors. Unless they intend bumping up the price for the iPad3.

So I may wait a month or two to see if the tastier tech drops a lot in price.

[Joeman]

i've got a Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1 purchased from ebay Argos outlet for £299, with one years waranty. quality bit of kit

[PAH]

Then there's the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition with a 8.2" 1280 x 800 screen for around £330 initial price.

Shame it only has 16gb storage and no expansion slot. s


Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition Android tablet ? reghardware

[PAH]

After further investigation it appears even 10" tablets aren't that great for reading full page up to A4 PDFs without scrolling/zooming, which is a pain when viewing documents/magazines with multiple columns.

All to do with readable font size, so while higher resolution 10" displays may display the text without too much aliasing the text size will be too small to be comfortably readable, especially for long periods of time associated with reading books/magazines.

As yet there doesn't appear to be many tablets larger than 10", so can either wait for any new models to be released, or use a convertible tablet PC and all the issues of size/weight/heat/price that they usually come with.

So for now I'll stick to reading my PDF books and magazines on my 24" monitor in portrait mode. You can stuff you iPads and me-too tablets up your jacksie, they're not fit for this purpose.

[d000hg]

A 10" tablet is only 1" or so smaller than being A4, seems odd that small about of zooming would be a problem. Maybe you should get your glasses prescription checked.

[Ignis Fatuus]

A 10" tablet is only 1" or so smaller than being A4, seems odd that small about of zooming would be a problem. Maybe you should get your glasses prescription checked.

Isn't the 10" = the diagonal? ISTM that according to an ancient Greek, the A4 diagonal would be 363mm or > 14".

[d000hg]

Oh, I suppose so.