Reuters It has been raining tablets in the Indian market over the past few weeks. But how to determine which one works best for you? ET takes a look at different tablet categories in search of an answer.
Twelve months is a very long time in technology. An Indian consumer wanting to purchase a tablet at this time last year had barely a handful of options to choose from, with most of them coming from the grey market and costing a fair bit. Today, the scene is very different. Almost every leading brand in the technology segment has a tablet out in the market.
And far from being the uber-expensive gizmos they were last year, some today cost lesser than a mid-segment segment. Of course, not all tablets are the same (how human!) – some do more, some less, and they are spread across different segments. If you are getting confused about which tablet you should pick (or pop), here is our rough guide to different tablet categories and whom they suit: (we are keeping Windows tablets out of the count at the moment as they are too similar to their desktop avatars – a person might as well buy a notebook!)
Notable devices: Apple iPad, Apple iPad 2 Price range: Rs 24,500 – Rs 46,900 We can hear the howls of protest and accusations of “Apple fan boys” coming our way for giving the iPad a category of its own but the stark fact is that as of now, the iPad dominates the tablet market. It has the best interface of them all and a very sleek design (especially in the iPad 2), but what really marks it out are its vast reservoir of apps that let you do just about everything from word processing to composing music to video chats on the device.
There will be complaints about Apple’s “closed environment” from developers whose apps get rejected but the fact is that all said and done, the iPad is miles ahead of the competition in the app department when it comes to quality. It lets you do more than most tabs – not because of its hardware (which is actually quite impressive) but because of its app edge, making many people oversee the niggles that still plague it, such as the need to depend on iTunes for transferring music and videos and the less than perfect multi-tasking. Until the competition finds its way around that, iPad users are going to be the happiest tablet users around. And of course, there is that logo on the back that makes the tablet flauntable!
Pros: Great interface; More apps than anyone else; Stunning battery life; Great design. Cons: Browsing still lacks Flash support; Multi-tasking is not as smooth as on other devices; No options to expand storage; Connectivity with other devices remains iffy
