JOIN USGood time to buy tablets
»The festive season is upon us, and every mobile device firm worth its salt is coming out with what it hopes will be the Tablet of the season. And Indian brands are going at
it with phablets too! For the uninitiated, a phablet is the middle space in screen size between tablets and smarphones.
This is actually a nice time to buy tablets, or tabs, as they are often shortened to. We are all but spoilt for choice in different categories, but that doesn’t mean that everything is as good as the next one, or that some device is the best just because it costs the most.
Take Apple’s iPads for example.
Any small, just-about significant upgrade in their specifications bumps up the cost by a few thousand rupees, when the cost to the company to incorporate that upgrade into the device would have probably cost them a tenth of that amount! And yet, iPads, like several other Apple products, remain the gold standard in their category!
The ease they lend to working has rarely been duplicated by most other tabs, as many iPad users would gladly testify.
Then, of course, there are Samsung’s Galaxy Tabs. With the new Android version already being shipped with these tabs, that’s just another reason to buy these features-packed devices for yourself or your loved ones.
An additional bonus here would be the fact that they don’t cost as much as Apple’s devices, and Google’s Play Store offers a bevy of free or cheap apps that can give Apple’s paid ones a run for their money any given day!
Of course, somewhere in between, or way above, come the Nokia and Microsoft Surface tablets running Windows, but given how Windows 8 has done on PCs, the software aspect alone and the tiled-app GUI in particular can be turn-offs.
And then you have the Indian brands – Micromax, Karbonn, iBall and the others – who are trying to corner the Indian market with their own tablets and phablets.
There’s no reason to entirely distrust them, but similarly, no reason to trust them blindly either. Of course, this is the segment where your eyes should veer to when your pocket is tight, your research on devices is good and you want something to work on rather than to show off.
The first check that should be done in this segment is the device specification – how much RAM, and of what kind, what screen and how densely packed with how many pixels, how much internal and external memory, what networks are supported, whether WiFi enabled and so on.
The next check should lead you towards portals that sell these devices, where the user reviews should tell you more than you need to know in order to zero in on the device. So, happy hunting!