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tablets    11/2/2022

Do not buy years old Apple or Android products because it cannot be updated to the current operating system. Applications may not run on these older OS’es. I had a 2015 iPad and several applications stopped working. And there are no replacement apps to install. As developers update their apps to work with the current OS’es, the older equipment gets closer to being obsolete.

September 2022 - Purchased a Lenovo P11 Pro tablet with a 11.5” 2560x1600 OLED screen that runs Android 12 on 6GB RAM, 128GB storage with a Snapdragon 730G chipset. This is not as sharp as LED panels as this is a pentile matrix. This is my first tablet that has 2 speakers on each side in landscape mode so watching video and listening to audio is vastly superior to the iPad which only have speakers on the right side.

My first exposure to tablets was a 16GB Toshiba Thrive 10.1" 1280x800 Android tablet with 1GB RAM, with removable battery, HDMI output, SDXC slot, mini USB data connection, and a 5v laptop style power supply. It is a little underpowered with a dual core 1GHz CPU. There is a non-slip back, requiring no cover. As the battery would not hold a charge, it was recycled.

Preordered the new iPad 16GB a week before its release and received it from China. It was delivered on launch date Friday, March 16, 2012. Expensive but wanted to try out iOS. It turns out a planetarium and telescope guiding program, SkySafari Pro and the subscriber version of the San Jose Mercury News runs without problems on iOS, but has growing pains on the Android OS. As the back is slippery, it requires a cover adding to weight and bulk. The retina 2048x1536 display is great at displaying fonts and graphics. It was finally updated to iOS7 after 4 months. Apple stole some features from the Android OS. It’s on iOS 9.3.5 now. There are lots of apps that cannot run on this. Recycled.

In April 2017, I bought a fifth generation gold iPad 32GB. As of iOS 11, the keyboard has numbers and special characters via a swipe down. The Apple designers finally added a swipe on the space bar for cursor control.

 During Black Friday weekend 2013, I bought a 32GB Nexus 7 (2013) with a 1920x1200 display and 2GB RAM. It has a quad core 1.5GHz Qualcomm CPU with no slots nor outputs. Very, very fast! I gave this to my daughter in 2016. Over the years, 4.4 got slower, I backed it up, kept root, and installed 6.0.1 on it. This will last another few years. The USB port got flaky and will not charge. Recycled.

In December 2013, I got a refurbished 32GB Nook HD+ which has a 9" 1920x1200 display and 1GB RAM, powered by a dual core 1.5GHz TI CPU, which is more than adequate. It also has a micro SD slot. The Nook OS is limiting, but that was altered to put a normal 4.2.2 OS on it. Since it has no cameras nor GPS, it was $110. This has been recycled.

For two-thirds of the price of a 32GB iPad mini Retina, there are two Android tablets. Both have rubberized backs for a non-slip grip.

In summer 2016, I got a refurbished Acer 8” 1920x1200 A1-840FHD with a Intel quad core CPU running at 1.8GHz for under $100. It’s got GPS, bluetooth, 802.11acn, but no compass, so I cannot use it for astronomy. This has been recycled.

In early 2018, I bought an LG-V520 G Pad X 8.0 GSM unlocked tablet with 32GB storage and accepts a microSD card. To prevent a popup complaining about SIM card missing, I put in a SIM from a closed account. Along with GPS, it has a full size USB port for keyboards, etc. It also has an infrared transmitter and can be programmed to operate some electronic gear. This is being used to a tune the middle octaves of the piano.