Honestly, I’m baffled by the tablet market. Everyone puts out underpowered devices. Even Google! How can you, in good faith, justify a tablet having a slower processor and less memory than a phone while trying to advertise it as the superior device, perfect for editing and whatnot?
My next tablet is going to be an x64 or ARM device that runs straight linux. Android is dead now that they are closing the software ecosystem.
I keep looking at the Starlite, it’s recently upgraded to an N350. But every time I’m about to pull the trigger, I can’t come up with enough use case.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention! That page made it look like an Android device but when you go to configure one, it’s Ubuntu.
Last I checked, they’ll pre-install any number of distros. I just… I don’t know what I’d use it for that justified a separate device from a laptop. Maybe once I get home assistant setup in my new place, but even then… what I’m really wanting is a Linux phone that I can use on Verizon’s network. But even there, I’m tending towards moving to my cell phone sitting on the charger 95% of the time, and using kdeconnect.
Yes, the Star Lite is still probably too big for my ideal use cases, where I’m really just looking for a libre pocket-sized device.
That is what I’m looking for. A tablet that can be used both for content consumption, via a full desktop browser experience, and for gaming, via steam, gog and epic. Also that can be used as a makeshift laptop in a pinch.
I went for a refurbished surface pro, some champions built and maintain a special kernel for it. It work well, still got some issues but it easily replaced my PC and. Tablette. But I don’t use android applications and games. I mostly use is in tablette mode to read manga on my balcony or in my hamoc in a parc.
I have a similar solution and waydroid works pretty well for a lot of things.
I never bought a tablet for myself, but I am looking at the Volla tablet with Ubuntu Touch. Same reason.
Tablets are worse laptops unless you’re a kid at a restaurant watching Bluey.
IDK, I haven’t used a tablet for years now.
I have a 6.7" Phone which is great for portability and easy to read, and when I want the bigger screen I use a “real” (old fashioned) computer, either laptop or desktop.
I still prefer the desktop format of a (Linux) PC. 32" desktop monitor is great IMO, and super for gaming.
The tablet fills a hole that doesn’t exist for me anymore.For the people around me, the only people using tablets are students. It’s actually very helpful for note taking and I don’t think there are any good alternatives to the iPad unfortunately.
2in1 laptops aren’t that useful when you need to both type and draw/write
Android tablets anyway. Has there ever been a good one?
Get an iPad, there isn’t a bad one, just less good ones. The $300 (or $330) base iPad is still better than like 95% of Android tablets, it can run Procreate, and it gives you access to the App Store. Nothing wrong with running an Android phone and an iPad. A lot of bloggers do it and recommend it, it’s a good “best of both worlds” scenario, especially if you’re into custom firmware on the Android side and tablet support is much less than it is on phones… might as well diversify at that point. Kind of like how if you’re gonna get a PC, you maybe want Windows for gaming, but for a laptop, you’d be a fool to not just get a MacBook for its performance and battery life. Laptop gaming is streaming anyway, both platforms do it just fine. And again, there really aren’t great PC laptops, and if they are, they’re hard to find.
Has there ever been a good one?
The original nexus 7 was pretty good (for the first few years of its life)
What constitutes good? And what makes an iPad good? I had an iPad pro about 4 years ago and I hated it and its’ idiotic appleisms. People were paroting that iPad is the way to go back then as well and I fell for it. I switched to a Samsung Tab S7+ and couldn’t be happier. I still use it daily, it does everything I need it to do and it does it better than the iPad.
Their hardware is meh, particularly for the price. I consider it GrapheneOS tax.
Wasn’t the tablet market eaten up by iPads and 2 in 1 laptops?
This was clearly written by someone ignoring new tablets, especially from china.
My main working device is a xiaomi pad.
Meanwhile all I want is a relatively cheap tablet sized display/AIO that can be powered by PoE and has no battery for displaying Home Assistant. (With ePaper it becomes totally crazy) Whoch seemingly is impossible.
Time to DIY!
Waveshare touchscreen for pi, 1200x800 is a good price and for home assistant that is fine. $70/75 for 8inch/10.1inch version. (10.1DP-CAPLCD)
Raspberry pi 3/4/5 can mount directly on the back of it. For whatever outrageous price Pis are now. (Around here, a 4B/4GB is 60€.
Wave share PoE hat for $20
Assemble it like Lego, put it in a wooden frame or 3D print, done. Around 160 USD plus shipping for a full build of a POE battery-less touchscreen display that runs full Linux of whatever flavor. (And is quite overkill as far as power).
You could probably do it even cheaper with an orange pi zero 3 with a PoE to USB-C converter or a Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro IoT which has PoE built in.
It is cheaper than a tablet and strips out the useless things like a battery, camera, really high DPI display, LTE radios, etc… For a simple home assistant kiosk.
But yeah, epaper displays are 3x the display cost without touchscreen.
I’d love to be able to repurpose my old kindles. I have 3 of them that have been gifted over the years and another two that I could probably just ask for since family members have newer ones.
Ideally I just want to have a simple ebook reader and nothing else for at least two of them.
The only issue is from the (admittedly small) searching I’ve done, they aren’t easy to root or install custom roms due to the software version or how new they are. I’ll admit I don’t exactly know what I’m even looking for.
I’d rather reuse things I already have than buy a new tablet just to read books on, especially since it seems like they’re just overpriced generic crap that all looks and mostly feels the same.
Once you have KOReader installed, you’ve got your perfect use case out of them, you don’t need to do anything more than that.
Cool thing about KOReader, you can have it sync to a folder on your computer, so if you… acquire an ebook you just put it in that folder, and it shows up on your kindle! There’s definitely more setup for that, so perfectly excusable if you’d prefer to just drop the ebooks on there over USB!
