Sunday, September 22, 2013

Logos hope visits Colombo Harbour and I need a tablet.

I ran out of Internet bandwidth for this month. SLT package I have at home gives my family the luxury of 25 GByte worth the Internet serf a month. Should we want to use after the bandwidth limit, we will have an Internet at a 64 KByte per second speed. So, got frustrated try to access my documents on Google Drive and switched off my computer to go see the "Logos hope" ship book fair.
Colombo Harbour
Colombo Harbour

There is always a mystery I feel about oceans or sea. I love big ships and I'm fortunate enough to go in two of the fairly big ones so far in my life. This was truly nice evening for me to visit Colombo port area and the "Logos hope" ship when they are parked in Colombo to showcase and sell books from all over the world. There were roughly about five thousand books and they were fairly reasonable on price. All the book prices were in units. 100 units' equal to 240 Sri Lankan Rupees, by-the-way. Also, I learned that Estelle van Eeden, originally from South Africa but now based in Sri Lanka, finished her two year commitment on the ship last year and she was there for her debut picture book, Lost Things, aimed at four to eight year olds. Logos Hope crew members helped at the launch of the book by dressing up as clowns, painting faces and hands and hanging out with the local kids from Colombo. "The Logos Hope crew have helped make this day awesome for the kids of our community in Sri Lanka," commented Estelle.
Logos hope ship - Colombo Harbour
Logos hope ship - Colombo Harbour

When I looked at these awesomely cool books with cool pictures and all awesome quality papers with the new-book-smell, I badly wanted to buy them, read them, keep them at home, look at them when I feel bored, sell them, buy more of them and want to write some of them best ones once I read enough books to write my own ones.
Colombo Harbour - Logos hope & Tiger Pearl
Colombo Harbour - Logos hope & Tiger Pearl 

So, let me start the real topic of this post. Tablets. If I really want to take my book-reading to next level, I need a tablet. I can't be buying books and taking with me everywhere to read. I feel having a nice tablet would really enhance my lifestyle as a book enthusiastic and wannabe writer. I always felt happy seeing people happily reading books/eBooks on their tablet at coffee shops, restaurants and parks etc.. There are things makes me happy I don't know why and now I just want a tablet. To be honest with you guys, I have two problems. One, I need to find the money to buy the tablet I want to buy. Second, I want to figure out what is the best one for me. There are about dozen good tablet makes and about a couple of good mobile operation systems the tablets use. Now about a few of years I want to buy a good tablet I could take with me everywhere and read, write and do my social networking. Ever since I watch the iPad mini promo video, I have this feeling that iPad could have been a better option. iPhone is awesome, it's just that I can't really do reading on my iPhone. I can't complain iPhone typing.

Colombo Harbour Area
Colombo Harbour Area

Now, I'm looking to buy a tablet that I could,
  1. Use flawlessly to reading things on the Internet.
  2. Better touch sensitivity. Type without getting annoyed with the touch software-keyboard. Physical keyboard compatibility is a must.
  3. Long battery life. I should be able to continually use it without charging at least for a day.
  4. It has to be either android or iOS. Not that I think Ubuntu or blackberry or doesn't do a good job, it's just that I think using an operating system most of others use would be an good option to relate to and talk about. Also, I expect them to grow faster than other operating systems. Windows is not an option. I had a chance to try it and I hate the whole thing. If you ask me, Microsoft sill doesn't understand the basic elements of user friendliness.
  5. use long time (Durability and build quality)
  6. has a better display.(High-definition, anti-glare display)
  7. use fast Internet (Wireless Internet connectivity and mobile broadband)
  8. use GPS satellite location
  9. take some normal shots or videos (I really don't care much about the camera.)
  10. save a lot things (Data storage. not very important. Cloud storage options for backup and syncing data across devices)
  11. have Accelerometer (Detects the physical movement and orientation of the tablet. This allows the touchscreen display to shift to either portrait or landscape mode. In addition, tilting the tablet may be used as an input [for instance to steer in a driving game])
  12. have Ambient light and proximity sensors, which help distinguish between intentional and unintentional touches.
  13. talk to the tablet (Speech recognition - Siri or Google Now)

You guys know how much of a good Google researcher I am, right? So, I used my super-power and did a bit of a research and found that toptenreviews.com published an excellent comparison and 10-9 ? Excellent, 8-6 ? Good,5-4 ? Average, 3-2 ? Poor & 1-0 ? Bad

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10


The new iPad Microsoft Surface Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Nexus 7 Sony Xperia Tablet S Asus Transformer Pad Infinity Kindle Fire HD Motorola Xoom BlackBerry Playbook HP Slate 2

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Ratings 10.00 9.93 9.68 9.65 9.50 9.20 9.20 8.68 7.90 7.90
Features









Operating System iOS 5 Microsoft RT Android 4.0 Android 4.1 Android 4.0 Android 4.0 Android 4.0 Android 3.1 BlackBerry Windows 7
Rear Camera 5.0MP 1.2MP 3.0MP N/A 8.0MP 8.0MP N/A 5.0MP 5.0MP 3.0MP
Front Camera 0.3MP 1.2MP 0.3MP 1.2MP 1.0MP 2.0MP 1.3MP 2.0MP 3.0MP 0.3MP
Communication Wi-Fi, 4G Wi-Fi / Bluetooth Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Wi-Fi
Battery Life (hours) 10 8 10 10 12 9.5 11 10 10 7.5
Warranty (years) 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Music Player
Accelerometer
Video Chat
GPS
Built-in eReader
HD Video Recording

Hardware









Processor Speed 1GHz 1.3GHz 1GHz 1.3GHz 1.4GHz 1.6GHz 1.2GHz 1GHz 1GHz 1.5 GHz
Processor Cores Dual-Core A5X Quad Core Tegra 3 Dual-Core Cortex-A9 Quad-Core Tegra 3 NVIDIA Tegra 3.0 NVIDIA Tegra 3 4-Plus-1 Dual-Core Cortex-A9 Dual-Core Cortex-A9 Dual-Core Cortex-A9 Intel Atom Z670
Memory 16/32/64GB 32/64 16/32GB + Up to 32GB 8/16 16GB + Up to 64GB 32/64GB 16/32GB 32GB 16/32/64GB 64GB
Built-in Speakers
Built-in Microphone
3.5 mm Headphone Jack
USB
Display









Screen Type Touchscreen Touchscreen Touchscreen Touchscreen Touchscreen Touchscreen Touchscreen Touchscreen Touchscreen Touchscreen
Screen Size (inches) 9.7 10.6 10.1 7 9.4 10.1 7 10.1 7 8.9
Screen Resolution 2048 x 1536 1366 x 768 1280 x 800 1280 x 800 1280 x 800 1920 x 1200 1280 x 800 1280 x 800 1024 x 600 1024 x 600
Height (inches) 9.5 10.81 6.9 7.8 9.5 10.35 7.6 9.8 7.6 9.2
Width (inches) 7.3 6.77 10.1 4.7 6.9 7.12 5.4 6.6 5.1 5.9
Depth (inches) 0.4 0.37 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.33 0.4 0.5 0.4 0.6
Weight (pounds) 1.46 1.5 1.28 0.75 1.26 1.3 0.87 1.6 0.9 1.5

iPad mini
iPad mini
The above table gives us a big clear picture of the feature and user ratings, however, the current superstar iPad mini is not in the comparison and that's my favourite by far. I watched the promo video on YouTube and I feel that this would be 1) very light weight 2) could use a day or two without recharging 3) should fit perfectly fine in my palm 4) could attach a Bluetooth enabled physical keyboard. 5) don't have to talk about the build quality, it's apple:) 6) It has the same screen resolution as the bigger one 7) I could sync the apps and data with my iPhone. Yet, I want to wait for a 64 bit iPad mini. Now that we have 64 bit iPhone with fingerprint scanner, my guess is that we would see a much advanced iPad mini in the near future and I badly want to wait for it. Also, obviously, use the time to save some money for it.

I hope you find this useful or interesting and could think about buying your own tablet. It would be wise for you to list down all the things you want to do with a tablet and compare the features against your budget before you buy. This post might have been a bit boring, if you're not planing on buying a tablet, but hey!, information is wealth:)