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Ok, my last Velo is dying a slow death. Battery is not charging and I figure I need a new portable device. The Velo is easier to type on than either the Dell Axim oir the Blackberry Bold, but lacks "bling". Looking at the new BlackBerry PlayBook from Rim (I want to play HD video and stuff) and the iPad is a nonstarter. Also, does anyone know if it will play Netflix? What other options might there be out there? I was looking at the Xoom, but I don't really want another phone. Too many toys and not enough work options :(
Diana
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Believe it or not...
Believe it or not, the Acer Aspire One NetBook is quite good for typing; does NetFlix just fine. Etc.
Anne
I've been considering one myself
for a cheap laptop I can take places without having to worry about damaging my "good" laptop or its cruddy battery life. My only problem is my general lack of trust/bad experience in the Acer brand. But, for just over two hundred bucks, can you really go wrong?
Melanie E.
I Currently own an Acer
I Currently own an Acer Travelmate C300 and a first Generation Acer AspireOne Netbook.
The Travelmate is a Windows TabletPC (Some call them convertible laptops). My friend Catrina and I bought 3 or four broken ones off ebay (Broken in the ways people normally break laptops and tablets) and resurrected them.
I've had the TabletPC working for about 3 years now (I finished building mine when Kim was still in the hospital, and used it for taking notes on Expo Summer and another project) and I love it. I don't use it as often as I should as it only has a 1.2ghz single core processor, but it still works great with XP when I just need to grab it and go. OR when I want to use it's tablet screen and my stylus.
My Acer AspireOne was bought brand new, and has only had one issue with it... At one point the battery stopped charging, but this was fixed with a bios update to the machine, that acer supplied almost immediately.
The one thing to remember, is that Acer has been trying for years to "crack" the us market, and they have finally accomplished this via purchasing other brands already in the market, and they are doing everything they can to keep a good name. Chances are, if you buy a Modern Acer PC you will get a top notch machine.
As usual, that's just my one sided $0.02, and I hope it helps in some way.
-HuGgLeS-
-P/KAF/PT
Netbook Tablet?
As much as I don't like what their foray into consumer electronics has done to the quality of their other products... I believe Asus has a Convertible or TabletPC version of their eee PC netbook, and I think Fujitsu has the same with their Lifebook netbook line.
They are usually a bit more expensive than the straight Netbooks (up into the $400 range for asus, and the $700 range for fujitsu) but can sometimes be come across for a bit cheaper on the 2ndary market.
I don't have links or model names off hand, but thought this might be a good compromise for something that works both ways. IT's not touch screen, but pen tablet. But there modifications that can be made for multi touch capable touch screen usage.
-P/KAF/PT
netbooks
I have one but I was kind of looking for something to fit in my purse. The netbook I have is a Lenovo and is about a year and a half old so it has XP on it (full Home version) so it runs pretty good and I replaced the hard drive with a SSD 30 GB drive (had 169 GB) and upped it to 1.5 GB. But, it is just a tad too big :(
Hugs
Diana
Size matters? :P
I know the feeling, I carry my B&N Nook with me and while the height and width is similar, it's the thickness that makes the diff. Right now my best piece of advice is to wait. Any android tablets that came before the Xoom are going to fall short of your expectations, and the Xoom is just too damn expensive right now.
I've been told that Apple has a strangle hold on suppliers making iPad parts which will cause Android Tablets to not be "inexpensive" for a couple more years, but I think we should give the various makers a few months to move new products into the markets and see what they have to offer. You don't want an android tablet running anything pre 3.0 and with the Ipad2 just releasing, someone other than Motorola is bound to release something new.
-HuGgLeS-
-P/KAF/PT
Just found this interesting
Just found this interesting multi-touch capable Tablet/Convertible @ Geeks.com which looks quite interesting....
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=BLK-INSPIRON-DUO-R&c...
-HuGgLeS-
-P/KAF/PT
I think that netbooks are a
I think that netbooks are a viable option to tablets; no touch screen but they are more open.
Depending on tablet size; Archos has a 7" model 70 and a 10" model 101; Samsung has a 7" model Tab.
Another tablet decision is with 3G/4G or not and the required data plan. The Archos are WiFi and bluetooth only.
Competition is driving tablet prices down; the Samsung Tab price (with data plan) in Canada has gone from $600. to
$500 to $400 to $300.
The Archos 70 and 101 are both in the $300 to $400 range.
I bought an Archos 70 at Christmas; and it is very nice as a portable media player and web browser; the 7" screen is a good compromise between screen size and portability.
Tigerdirect.ca and Tigerdirect.com sell a number of different Android based tablets.
Good luck !!
On a related note.
With all the tablets out there and some people being all about the picture I'm surprised no one has offered up one with an OLED screen.
As for the Xoom, just a precautionary message, that it is Google's OS and they have a noteworthy relationship with government officials, i.e. creepy. Of course Google doesn't openly disclose that one of their heads was ex-CIA for one example. I have more, including the fact they won't divulge their relationship with the NSA.