Choosing a $400 Tablet Device

So I proposed to my partner that we invest in a new tablet. I suggested one of the new Kindle fire HDs that would add touch capability to my reading, plus media capability, and select Android Apps. As a student prime member already, the device sits very comfortably rooted in the Amazon consumer-system, which I find extremely impressive.

"iPad," was all she said.

The point was clear, "if we're are going to invest in a tablet device, why not go with something better established."

Following her lead I went about the process of investigating three current tablet options on the market to decide between. Here are the criteria I used in order of importance:

1) price - we had a budget of $400
2) productivity - the real reason we needed this thing was to assist in my assignments for school. But media consumption is what all tablets do well, we needed to find something powerful enough to do more.
3) reliability/support - as a student, I'm very poor. I don't need to replace items every 6months to two years. I'd prefer this thing to last my program.

With these criteria, I narrowed down my search to the three best performers, and then tried to make the price point. Here are the contenders:

1) the iPad, in what ever iteration I could find at the price
2) Samsung Galaxy Tab or Note 10.1"
3) the ASUS VIVOTab 10.1" windows 8


If your are searching for a list of the best tablets and why, you should stop here. I'm not including my research, reviews collected, or extensive specs on these models. These are, to my mind the top three tablets I'd be willing to sink my money into. If you would like to know why something did not make the list, feel free to ask. What follows is info on choosing your buying options when the price is fixed and you want to find the best value for the money. Chances are, you already know if you are an apple person or an android person. I have no interest in changing minds either way.


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IPAD:
Absolutely everywhere prospective buyers look to research tablets, the iPad is #1 on the critics' list. Apparently the mini and the iPad top out the list, with iPad 3 and iPad 2 falling somewhere down the line. You can find those specs, but allow me to point out that the 3 model adds retina display, and a slightly improved processor, camera, and 500 more Meg's of RAM. Honestly, the display is probably the most important upgrade to factor in when deciding between a 2 or 3. I'm not considering the mini because we decided we wanted the biggest screen for our dollar.

Prices vary by model/ options. For my budget, I'm sticking with WIFI-only, and i use a mental slider to move proportionately from price to storage size ($519-$398). So an iPad 2 might offer 32GB for the price of a 16GB iPad 3. For me storage is important, but I want to integrate my tablet with cloud and home network storage options to access/backup files for school. It isn't as big of a factor to me.

*winning features* the App Store, retina display 3rd an 4th Gs), lots of inexpensive 3rd party apps and accessories, and a solid reputation for build


Samsung Galaxy Tab/Note 2 10.1":
I apologize that I keep lumping these two together, but this is mostly because, like the ipad, they are pretty much the same thing in two flavors. The note has a faster processor, more RAM, and includes a stylus and advanced handwriting functions built in, but, in truth, the tab can do this as well if you make an investment in the stylus and software. As a student I care about this feature. Handwriting notes can be useful in class. Reviews are mixed concerning how either of them actually perform handwriting tasks, though. The resolution is adequate for 720 HD viewing, but not competitive with the iPad, and the use of a proprietary (apple-looking) charge connector is obnoxious. Between the two, the Note wins for performance, and the tab wins on price.The difference between price new is significant ($330 vs $480) but with new models very soon to be released, these costs will go down.

*winning features* SD card slot (!!!) - expandable to 32GB - why more tablets do not offer expandable storage makes no sense to me. Android App Store, solid build reputation, and file system access for better PC integration, bigger screen than iPad.

ASUS VivoTab Smart ME400C 10.1":

Honestly, this is the tablet the world needs. Unlike the VivoTab RT (avoid at all costs) version, this model uses a fully featured windows 8 operating system. Love it or hate it, this is way more functional as a productive workstation than all mobile OSs. It also has a bone fide Intel® Atom™ Z2760 Dual-core CPU @ 1.8 GHz - this outclasses ALL other mobile processors. It won't out perform a fully featured desktop or laptop, but it will cost less than the latter, and be more portable than either. Chances are, this is more processing power than your office PC of 7 years ago - doesn't sound too impressive, until you hold it in your hand or slide it into you purse. The OS allows you to switch between the conventional Windows desktop and the Metro UI which runs apps from the newish Windows App Store. To my mind, reviews of the store seemed lackluster at best with many apps reportedly not ready for prime time. Coupled with the barely HD resolution (1366 x768), and the lack of apps, one should reach for this machine as a workhorse more than a media consumer.

The draw here is that with standard 64 GB of memory and a micro USB port, you can load up most of your windows applications and run them on the go! My goodness, how novel, a portable computer! But seriously, if you want your tablet to do more than spoon feed you more entertainment, this is huge. You'll no longer need to sift through millions of app descriptions trying to find productivity apps that suit your specific needs (check out my forthcoming apps suggestions for students). For me, not paying for an additional set of barely functional office products is a pretty big deal. If you want to go this route, check the windows 8 software compatibility tool on the Microsoft site to make sure you preferred applications will run.

A major caveat, is that the desktop screen resolution is natively very small, making tap-selections a pain with fingers and stylus, not to mention hard to see. But that isn't to say it's ugly or unstable, just not brilliant. There are great demonstration vids on YouTube for the interested.

Price $450

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Verdict:

I'm not trying to tout the best tablet, merely offer a guide on buying a tablet at $400. All of the models mentioned above exceed this price except the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the iPad 2, so if you want to buy new, those are your options. Both are excellent. The choice will come down to how close to $400 you want to spend, and which AppStore you prefer (apple or android). Seriously, most everything else is a wash.

I'm comfortable buying used or open box, and amazon warehouse has some great options to pick up an iPad 3, galaxy note, or VivoTab smart in used like new condition at or below $400. Never settle for less than like new condition, and personally I avoid refurbished in most cases (Walmart sells cheap refurbished options if that's your thing). Like new can be an open box return or replacement where the item was barely handled. Also, be sure wherever you buy there is a rock solid return policy (usually 30 days). Amazon is the king of no-hassle returns, and it makes sense why they have like new returns in stock, so this is my preferred option.

eBay and Craigslist are viable options, with eBay being the lesser of the two. There are many many shady sellers out there so I recommend caution. Craigslist is a bit safe given you can actually demo the device before you buy it, but that's only if you are comfortable meeting strangers with significant amounts of cash.

The one option on this list that cannot be purchased for $400 dollars used - like new is the new 4th Gen iPad. Amazon sells these new for $470, and used prices do not drop below $430. Curiously, the price of the 4 and 3 are extremely close new, but the used market has a nearly $130 dollar difference. I won't speculate the whys, but so long as this holds, your best iPad option at $400 is the iPad 3.

In the end, we picked up the iPad 4 for $398 at a local best buy (a place I never ever shop). I found this by searching the local open box items online. We were told that the return had no charger with it and was being sold at a discount. The price had actually dropped three times before we got it. To beat all, the charger was actually in the box, under the molded insert! If i had not found the best ipad in this price range, I would most likely have purchased the VivoTab smart by ASUS. For my needs as a student, it is the best all-round option. But, with mixed reviews out there, and price not a decisive factor, I went with the best buy (pun intended). I hope you'll be as lucky, but by all means, check your local stores for like new returns!!

Considering Hard Drive Failure

After a very long and happy relationship, the family PC died. Of course, it waited until everyone relied on it as the sole source of entertainment and then died, but it was a very reliable and happy relationship leading up. This sounds very much like the loss of a family pet - in purely superficial ways, I don't want to trivialize real loss - but I want to offer some coping strategies that might help easy the transition.


Prevention = Backup. Like the necessary hassle of taking a pet to the veterinarian for regular checkups and maintaining shot records, keeping regular with backups is absolutely essential to PC health. For many people, they avoid the lengthy time it takes to initiate a backup until they have a scare of some sort and then start keeping up for a while and taper off over time. What they don't realize is that if they wait until there is a problem, they could be backing up the root cause of the issue. I recommend one start backing up on day one and do it as often as every day - this will cut the actual time the backup takes, it will provide multiple restore points (perhaps prior to contracting a virus), and will keep all changes up to date.

     There are many excellent, and often free, third party backup softwares, but both Windows 7 and Mac OSX have great backup and restore options. I highly recommend a complete backup including a drive image. Due to Mac architecture, a time machine backup is basically an image of the drive by default, but PC users have the option of turning this on or off in Backup and Restore settings. A disk image will greatly increase the size of the backup, but it is worth it not to have to re-install all of your software after a catastrophe. [For an explanation of my preferred method of backup, click here.]

Choosing a New Hard Drive - Considerations. In the same way that choosing a new pet involves asking oneself questions of compatibility, so too will selecting the new hard drive of your machine and they are: cost, storage size, performance, and warranty.

Cost: Give yourself a budget, and search around. Prices fluctuate from site to site. Absolutely do not walk into a retail store until you've checked online prices - there can be HUGE differences.

Size: Bigger is not necessarily better in terms of hard drive space. I don't recommend buying a new system drive over 500GB unless you intend to buy a secondary drive of the same size as a backup. System disks are the location of all of your system operation files and, in most cases, the location of your software as well. If you are both storing all of your files and running all of your programs from the same place, especially when you are storing huge amounts of data, then some bottlenecking can occur and performance will be reduced. In most cases, this will be unnoticeable, but not always. If the drive is being used only for storage, however, get as big as you like, but keep in mind, the more information you store on a drive, the more you have to lose in a catastrophe. So, again, I recommend buying two and backing up your backups or using some cloud-based storage service if your needs exceed being able to physically provide a solution on site.

Performance: The rule of thumb used to be that if you wanted a better performing hard drive, you had to buy a 3.5" drive for your desktop. This is no longer the case. Now, 2.5" laptop hard drives are just as fast and offer all the same features in a smaller footprint. In fact, advantages are often that laptop format drives are also cooler and require less power to operate as well as being able to compensate for movement and drops. In my latest foray into HDD purchasing, I actually found that they were cheaper, too. So ignoring the physical size of the drive, the performance will depend on the spindle rate (5400,7200, 10,000 or 15,000rpm) and firmware technologies. Most drives are in the 54-7200 spindle speed bracket. The upper registers will cost significantly more because the technology to create these speeds requires some physical changes in disk access, but moving from 54 to 72 can give considerable performance gains as well.
Another factor is AF (advanced format), you may want to monitor whether your new drives support the AF functionality as, at the time I am writing this, software does not use the AF function and the drives are forced to compensate for the older format. Interestingly, I found in my drive selection process that Western Digital drives did not clearly indicate whether a drive was AF while Seagate did. I find this a little disturbing because there are some clear cases of incompatibility, so I recommend you do your homework before making a purchase - particularly if you are using WinXP or Vista.

Warranty. It sucks, I mean it really really sucks when your machine's HDD dies and all of your collected junk goes missing. If the failure is irreparable and you have no backup, it's really really gone. The only possible solution is to send the drive off for data recovery which is really expensive, and still not a guarantee that any or all of your data can be retrieved.  However, one silver lining might be to get a replacement drive, at least. In my latest disaster, I was able to purchase a drive with a 5 year warranty over a 1 year for only $5 more per drive - it was even the same brand and better specs. Immediately after buying the drives and installing, I'd recommend you immediately register the products at the company website. This will smooth out the RMA process in case of a failure, and you will already have an account with the support site.


Additional Considerations. Is your computer set to use AHCI? Current motherboards have the option to turn on AHCI in the BIOS. Presently, the jury is out on whether using AHCI improves performance. In my case, it was required to open up all the SATA ports and  had the added benefit of allowing hot-swapping of my many drives. It isn't the hidden issue that AF is, but it can be tricky. If you have to do a new install of your OS (up to Windows 7 SP1), AHCI is turned off by default. I have no idea what the logic in this is because all that this element does in windows is not to accept a start up in the interface format even though all of the necessary features are already there and running. So if your board is set to AHCI, and your previous install was operating in AHCI before the failure, you'll need to turn this off in the BIOS and turn on AHCI compatibility in Windows before the feature can be used. In my case, the machine would not boot up, even after this process was properly carried out, until I removed my incompatible SATA DVD drive from the boot sequence.