Honestly, I’m baffled by the tablet market. Everyone puts out underpowered devices. Even Google! How can you, in good faith, justify a tablet having a slower processor and less memory than a phone while trying to advertise it as the superior device, perfect for editing and whatnot?
Tablets are worse laptops unless you’re a kid at a restaurant watching Bluey.
My next tablet is going to be an x64 or ARM device that runs straight linux. Android is dead now that they are closing the software ecosystem.
Huawei says, “Let me introduce you to The Fold.”
I’d love to be able to repurpose my old kindles. I have 3 of them that have been gifted over the years and another two that I could probably just ask for since family members have newer ones.
Ideally I just want to have a simple ebook reader and nothing else for at least two of them.
The only issue is from the (admittedly small) searching I’ve done, they aren’t easy to root or install custom roms due to the software version or how new they are. I’ll admit I don’t exactly know what I’m even looking for.
I’d rather reuse things I already have than buy a new tablet just to read books on, especially since it seems like they’re just overpriced generic crap that all looks and mostly feels the same.
Once you have KOReader installed, you’ve got your perfect use case out of them, you don’t need to do anything more than that.
Cool thing about KOReader, you can have it sync to a folder on your computer, so if you… acquire an ebook you just put it in that folder, and it shows up on your kindle! There’s definitely more setup for that, so perfectly excusable if you’d prefer to just drop the ebooks on there over USB!
IDK, I haven’t used a tablet for years now.
I have a 6.7" Phone which is great for portability and easy to read, and when I want the bigger screen I use a “real” (old fashioned) computer, either laptop or desktop.
I still prefer the desktop format of a (Linux) PC. 32" desktop monitor is great IMO, and super for gaming.
The tablet fills a hole that doesn’t exist for me anymore.Wasn’t the tablet market eaten up by iPads and 2 in 1 laptops?
An iPad is a tablet.
The problem is that most people use tablets as a media consumption device, so the need to update is far less than a phone. Even then, the smartphone market has cratered as justification for flagship phones have dropped. As tablets have a lower demand than phones, that market has completely dried up.
Yes, I’m aware an iPad is a tablet, the tablet market was eaten up by Apple tablets and laptops that turn into a tablet. Plus large phones, as you’ve mentioned.
Meanwhile all I want is a relatively cheap tablet sized display/AIO that can be powered by PoE and has no battery for displaying Home Assistant. (With ePaper it becomes totally crazy) Whoch seemingly is impossible.
Time to DIY!
Waveshare touchscreen for pi, 1200x800 is a good price and for home assistant that is fine. $70/75 for 8inch/10.1inch version. (10.1DP-CAPLCD)
Raspberry pi 3/4/5 can mount directly on the back of it. For whatever outrageous price Pis are now. (Around here, a 4B/4GB is 60€.
Wave share PoE hat for $20
Assemble it like Lego, put it in a wooden frame or 3D print, done. Around 160 USD plus shipping for a full build of a POE battery-less touchscreen display that runs full Linux of whatever flavor. (And is quite overkill as far as power).
You could probably do it even cheaper with an orange pi zero 3 with a PoE to USB-C converter or a Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro IoT which has PoE built in.
It is cheaper than a tablet and strips out the useless things like a battery, camera, really high DPI display, LTE radios, etc… For a simple home assistant kiosk.
But yeah, epaper displays are 3x the display cost without touchscreen. Though in my opinion, epaper is better for static non-interactive sensor display which can run on battery with an MCU for almost no power because it only has to update once an hour or so.
Android tablets anyway. Has there ever been a good one?
Get an iPad, there isn’t a bad one, just less good ones. The $300 (or $330) base iPad is still better than like 95% of Android tablets, it can run Procreate, and it gives you access to the App Store. Nothing wrong with running an Android phone and an iPad. A lot of bloggers do it and recommend it, it’s a good “best of both worlds” scenario, especially if you’re into custom firmware on the Android side and tablet support is much less than it is on phones… might as well diversify at that point. Kind of like how if you’re gonna get a PC, you maybe want Windows for gaming, but for a laptop, you’d be a fool to not just get a MacBook for its performance and battery life. Laptop gaming is streaming anyway, both platforms do it just fine. And again, there really aren’t great PC laptops, and if they are, they’re hard to find.
Android was until recently an acceptable choice, while iOS has never been acceptable, no matter how “good” they make them. They are poisoned. Apple in general has always been extremely consumer-hostile and they are not trustworthy for the kind of relationship that they abusively force on their users.
Call me a fool, but Macbooks are 300-500 euros more than a decent windows laptop.
What constitutes good? And what makes an iPad good? I had an iPad pro about 4 years ago and I hated it and its’ idiotic appleisms. People were paroting that iPad is the way to go back then as well and I fell for it. I switched to a Samsung Tab S7+ and couldn’t be happier. I still use it daily, it does everything I need it to do and it does it better than the iPad.
Has there ever been a good one?
The original nexus 7 was pretty good (for the first few years of its life)
I loved my nexus 7.
Nope, the touchscreen was terrible. It would have been nearly a perfect device for the time. Phones were smaller, and it was a nice accessory for watching videos and playing games that were less convenient on a smaller phone with poor battery life, but… It barely registered touch inputs.
Still salty about that waste of money. The forums were just full of people complaining about it and Google tried to fix it with software, but it just didn’t work right.
Not something I noticed from several years of use. Every touchscreen I’ve used has behaved the same since they moved from resistive to capacitive!
