Tablet or something similar buying help

[heart-of-wessex]

Hello all,

Can anyone with a knowledge of tablet's help please?

I have an old iPad, handed down from my Mum who had it for some time and was getting rid of it so I had it, as I was only looking for something to use as a PDF reading device and the occasional webpage and it works great, no sim card or anything like that in it, as I keep it at home it's connected to the WiFi.

It is however getting old it seems, don't know if it's an iPad thing or not but it keeps telling me it needs to be updated, but it won't update as it's too old...or something. And it's quite sluggish on PDF files. I have these all on Dropbox, which I open Adobe on the iPad and can access them there, it's all NR Working Timetables for Rail Sim so I don't have to keep tabbing back to the desktop to see the file. But when I want to use the search to find '1A02', on Page 82 say, it takes some time to find it. Then I can open another PDF Working Timetable, and go back to the first one, it will remember where I was at Page 82. However if I open a 3rd PDF, well it's lost memory by then and going back to the first PDF, it's forgotten where it was, resets to Page 1 and I have to search for 1A02 again.

Other times I use Safari to go on NATS for my Flight Simulator so I can load up charts for airports, but even then the links are at the bottom of the page, and if I press the back button, it goes to the bottom of the page for a second, blinks and then resets back to the top, so I've got to scroll all the way to the bottom again, it's just annoying, and can't seem to handle the web page that well.

Is there any sort of budget tablet anyone can recommend that I can use just for the odd website like above and for reading PDF's, not interested in the rest of the gadgets and I don't need a sim or anything like that, just one that can link to the WiFi.

A Samsung £200 Tablet is too much when I don't want to use it for much, and Google ones don't seem to be any cheaper..


Any help appreciated! I know zilch about the Tablet Market, the iPad is the only one I've ever had, and only because it was free

James.

 

[Bletchleyite]

There's two that could be used for that purpose - the Alba one from Argos and the cheapest Amazon Fire tablet. Both come in at around £50, but do be aware that they are markedly inferior (slower, clunkier and a poor quality screen) compared to an iPad, and they're both 7" models so aren't really much more than an oversized phone compared with a 9" iPad.

 

[pdq]

Sensible Android tablets are the Samsung Galaxy A 8" at £150, just bought 25 of these for work use. There's also a Lenovo 7" at Argos for £60 which will be better than the Alba, but only has 16GB storage, which will fill up all too easily. Look for 32GB storage ideally as a starting point.

 

[dmncf]

I have an Asus Android-based tablet which is now over 5 years old, a little slow but still working fine. In contrast I have a Lenovo laptop which was crippled within a few months of purchase due to having too little storage - its spec was just unworkable. Hence I'd recommend Asus and not recommend Lenovo.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I have an Asus Android-based tablet which is now over 5 years old, a little slow but still working fine. In contrast I have a Lenovo laptop which was crippled within a few months of purchase due to having too little storage - its spec was just unworkable. Hence I'd recommend Asus and not recommend Lenovo.

I think that's probably oversimplistic - you very much need to evaluate whether the spec of a PC is suitable for you before purchase, whereas tablets are simpler products and should to some extent "just work".

 

[py_megapixel]

There's two that could be used for that purpose - the Alba one from Argos and the cheapest Amazon Fire tablet

I wouldn't advise purchasing an Amazon Fire for anything but the most simplistic use. The operating system is very restrictive and you are likely to find that some of the software you want to use is simply not available for it. I strongly suggest you buy a tablet which runs Android properly, not a Fire, if possible within your price range (even if it's a little more expensive)

 

[Bevan Price]

Have you tried getting a free "junk clearance" app. for tablets or smart phones. For Android phones, there is a free version of ccleaner, so I assume there is something similar for ipads, iphones, etc. It is surprising how much unwanted garbage gets written to devices when they are connected to the internet, and it all consumes lots of memory space,

 

[heart-of-wessex]

Thank you guys!

The Lenovo looks ideal to be fair! Cheap, 16GB is way more than I need. On my iPad I have about 50 PDF files I use, at 4MB each or thereabouts so that's only 200MB, and that's all on Adobe Acrobat that reads the PDF's from my dropbox account. The other airport maps are on a website, so I wouldn't be using that much space to be honest.

The 10" looks more like the ideal size, that's approx what my iPad is which is handy

 

[dgl]

Just be aware that the amount of storage available could be closer to 10GB (not too sure on the size of an android install) as like a PC the 16GB of memory is generally also used to store the OS (android in this case).