Quote Originally Posted by 1BadVan View Post
Sorry for hijackingthis thread but didn't thinkit was worth a thread of it's own. But all this talk of I Pad androids etc Im thinking of getting one whats the benefit. Was thinking of a PDA but think I will regret it. My use will be in the classroom as a teacher and more importantly viewing this forum.

Cheers Dave
Number one is to do your research.
You have 3 players at the moment: Apple, Android & Windows. Windows is pretty much out of the game now, with very slow and clunky tablets that do not perform.
Apple by far has the most experience in the product in terms of generation development and support.
Android (e.g. Google Tablets) is the newer kid on the block and some would say have the benefit of seeing what is/was on the market and developing it further.

I have owned an iPad and used that for a while, and also bought a couple Android tablets (Motorola Xoom & Asus Transformer). So I think I am qualified enough to give you my personal opinion on how they worked for me.
The first thing I did was establish what I wanted to do with my tablet and investigated the pros and cons of the brands and models.

For me... The tablet is a portable web browser, messaging tool (email, facebook, google+ etc), portable media box (music & movies), document tool and calendar.
From there I looked into how the iPad and Android tablets did these things and settled on what suited me.

Instead of listing my pros and cons I'll just give you my opinion FWIW.

Apple is slim, fast and pretty. It does require you to use iTunes for pretty much all your content e.g Media, music, photos etc. If you have a cd collection, it needs to go through your iTunes catalogue on your PC and get sync'd with your iPad. Buy a book on an iPad it's through iTunes... I couldn't even watch TV shows from my PC without iTunes telling me it had to get converted!
If you buy an Apple product, you must do things the way Apple tells you to do it - No customising or thinking for yourself. The iPad is primarily aimed at people who want a tablet but don't want to have too many options available to them.

Android is thicker, fast and cool. Android tablets pretty much hook into the Google cloud if you want it to. You do have various options like Open Office, QuickOffice or msOffice Lite. for your document management, music and videos can be watched in any format (avi, vlc, mp4, mp3, wav etc) they do not need to be converted! Sharing files is a snap with a google account or just copy and paste from device to PC. Also the Android Tablet is customisable!

I guess you know what I have become a fan of


(This was sent from my Motorola Xoom)