Tablet Upgrade Time

My digital lifestyle has never really gotten tablet-centric. As much as I wanted to love them, I ended up being the lone holdout in our household. Yes, I would carry my ThinkPad "Slate", Android tablet around on occasion, but more times, than not, I wouldn't use it and even took to avoiding toting it altogether since it was so big and heavy. It turns out that getting the larger (10") class of tablet was a mistake for me. That made it too close to the "ultrabook" class of laptops that I was already using. 

 

At the time that I picked up the tablet, I was using the ThinkPad X300, and over the 3+ years since, I've gone on to the X301, followed by the X1. All of these machines are on, or close to the cutting edge in terms of "thin and light" for notebook computers...... which unfortunately, put the rather "heavy-weight" 10.1" ThinkPad Tablet too close in carry-load. And obviously, one of the very cool features of that tablet; that of the keyboard/folio, became a non-entity since it push the size and weight squarely into the notebook range! Don't get me wrong: the tablet was a very nice example of it's type and it's large IPS display made it and excellent reader and media display. ......But....... there was just not enough of a differentiation between it and my notebooks of choice!

Interestingly, it was the exact opposite usage model of my wife, who's notebook is a ThinkPad T500 with a 15" screen. This machine weighs between 5 and 6 pounds (maybe a little more since it has the extended 9-cell battery) making the difference between it and her iPad Air marked! For her, carrying around the laptop isn't an option, but the iPA really a none issue especially since she quite commonly lugs around a good sized bag with all manner of school teacher stuff in it. So it became pretty obvious to me that downsizing was going to a good answer for my tablet woes.

Now..... if I were a rich man..... (I'll save you the musical quote), I'd buy myself the Sony Xperia Z3 tablet and be done with it. It has a truly excellent (although, non-OLED) display and really nice metal construction giving it a nice thin profile and cutting the weight. It also has the ability to connect to and stream PS4 games from that console. Pretty cool if you own the console.

Think, somewhere between an iPad Air and Mini in size with similar feel. It's NICE!!! Somewhere between $450 and $500 worth of nice. Again, iPad Air comparisons are appropriate, but it runs Android. Yeah right..... now back to the real world of Frugal Propellerheads!

So, that's where this..... the nVidia Shield Tablet: he "poor man's" super-tablet comes into the picture. We can start with the list price being $300. That's not peanuts, but it's $200 less than the Sony for pretty much the same capabilities AND has a few tricks up it's sleeve. OK, I'll put you out of your misery and go ahead an tell you that I gave $185 for mine off of eBay. The seller stated that he was having trouble with WiFi connection, so I took the chance that he either had bad location on his access point location or didn't know what he was doing. I don't have any idea which is was, but I can say, I've had no issues with it at all. Is it the strongest at pulling in a signal? No, but neither is it terrible. I have to switch from one AP to the other when I move to opposite ends of my house, but I have to do with with most of my other devices as well. So yeah..... that's right...... $185!!! That's a pretty good deal in my book for arguably the #2 Android tablet on the market today after the Nexus 9! 

 

I did say "some tricks up it's sleeve" didn't I? A couple of posts ago, I talked about nVidia's Shield concept of being able to stream games. Over the course of the last 3 years, they've grown the concept and fleshed out the product line to include original Shield Portable running the Tegra 4, followed by the Shield Tablet the next year running the K1 processor and this year has seen the release of the Shield Console with the X1. All optimized for gaming with customized GPUs. So, not only do you have a device good at Android games, but the ability to play PC games from your gaming computer, but nVidia's Grid streaming service as well. That's a lot of capability. When you throw in Android emulation apps..... this device is literally "a game changer" (no pun intended)!

Most of you know that I'm not much of a gamer, but the fact is; I'm a sucker for interesting (cool) technology! And this family of products is definitely cool! Plus it's price-point makes it darn near irresistible! I do have another rationale in that I'm the sponsor of our school's computer club. Gaming and gamers are a big part of that. Shouldn't I be fully up to date on that part of the computing world!?!