Monday 9 May 2016

Windows 10 tablets

Well,

hard though it is to admit it, I'm quite enjoying Windows 10 on my Dell laptop. Yes, there's some minor irritations, but it's no worse than Xubuntu or OS X.

So, out of curiosity I thought I'd do a desk exercise of seeing if a Windows tablet could replace one of my Android tablets. I've no intention of doing this for real, I've already got a ridiculous number of devices.

So the device. A little hunting with Google's shopping search shows that you can get a reasonable 8" device for just over $100 (be aware, this is slightly unrealistic - one of the big box retailers is dumping stock through ebay at the moment), however you can get noname Asian devices for around the same price. For a brand name device, entry level is between $150 and $200. You can pay more for a bigger screen, more internal storage etc but you can get something reasonable for under $200.

Applications - well the reason to use Windows is that you can use the same applications as on your desktop. So what windows apps do I use already?


  • The Guardian
  • Weather
  • Twitter
and that's about it. On my day to day Android devices I use the same applications plus a Markdown editor, Dropbox, an rss reader, the ABC news app and gmail and a calendar app that syncs with Google.

Well, hunting through the Windows app store, they (or equivalents) are all there - there's even a gmail app even though I'm guessing Microsoft would prefer me to use my Windows Live account.

So, if one of my daily use Android tablets was to die on me and I needed to replace it fast Windows  would fit the bill, but, and it's a big but, while I could source a discounted 10" Windows tablet for around $200, I could equally easily pick up a decent discounted brand name  Android device for about the same ...