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Posted: March 26, 2018 |
If a 7- or 8-inch screen just won't do, the Lenovo Tab 2 A10 is currently the best big tablet you can get for less than $200. Its hearty 10-inch IPS display is sharp (with a 1900x1200 resolution) and bright, and while its blue polycarbonate build doesn’t feel high-end, it at least looks refined for a budget slate. Its 16GB of storage can be tripled through a microSD card, its speakers are great (though they should be on the tablet’s front, not back), and its beefy battery got us around a truly superb 11 hours of life per charge.The Tab 2’s performance is a bit more mixed, but again, it’s fine for surfing and streaming. The 64-bit, quad-core MediaTek processor and 2GB of RAM will stutter with console-style games or serious multitasking, but for casual browsing and Netflix watching, it gets the job done. Just don’t expect the kind of workhorse you’d get with a Lenovo laptop. Refreshingly, the Tab 2 opts for a clean, nearly stock Android experience instead of inevitably failing with a custom skin. It comes with version 4.4 KitKat by default, but you can upgrade to version 5.0 Lollipop out of the box. There’s very little bloatware — and the unnecessary apps that are here are all totally removable — and the gesture controls Lenovo adds to the proceedings are easily ignorable. (Though some, like drawing an “e” to open your email, can be fun.)Otherwise, if you’re at all familiar with Google’s mobile OS, you’ll easily be able to get around here. Although Android’s interface and app store aren’t as optimized for tablets as iOS, it’s still a good-looking and highly customizable platform, and it’s only gotten more straightforward for newcomers as the years have passed. When, or if, it'll be updated remains to be seen, however. A Lenovo rep tells us there should be an upgrade to Android 6.0 Marshmallow in the future, but that they don't have an exact time frame for the release at this time. The Tab 2 A10 has a smaller sibling called the Tab 2 A8 that goes for $75 less, but it’s too widely handicapped to be worth recommending. The A10, meanwhile, is an obvious value, especially when you consider how difficult it can be to find quality 10-inch slates for cheap.For another smaller Android option, try the Asus ZenPad S 8.0. This is the spiritual successor to the Asus MeMo Pad, which itself was as a successor to Asus' old Nexus 7, whose praises we’ve sung before. Much like those devices, the ZenPad looks and feels nicer than its modest price would suggest. It doesn’t have the iPad's aluminum, but its matte-and-leather chassis is slimmer, lighter, and smoother than you’d expect a $200 device to be.That’s aided by an 7.85-inch 2K (2048x1536) display that, while not as upper-class as that resolution would suggest, is still sharp and lively, with great viewing angles. Its colors could stand be a little more accurate, but it’s better than most of what you’ll find in this price range. This configuration of the ZenPad runs on a quad-core Intel Atom processor and 2GB of RAM. As with the Tab 2 above, it isn’t as consistent with heavier-duty tasks, but it’s more than serviceable for using casually around the house. There’s 32GB of included storage, which is, again, nicely expandable with a microSD card. Battery life isn’t great, though, usually lasting around 5-6 hours per charge. That’s not a huge deal given that lots of people aren’t going to tax their tablets too heavily, but stronger is always better.The bigger annoyance is with Asus’ custom Android skin, ZenUI. It runs over Android 5.1 Lollipop, but it strips away a chunk of the warmness and convenience of the base OS. It’s still Android, so it’s never outright difficult to use, but it’s blander, and much of Asus’ tinkerings aren’t obviously useful. (It does have similar gesture controls as the A10, though, as well as a handy double-tap-to-wake feature.) Thankfully, you can always go to the Google Play store and download an alternate launcher instead.You can’t get around the sheer amount of bloatware on this thing, though. Most of it can be disabled or uninstalled, but having to deal with it in the first place is no fun.It’s worth noting that there’s a step-up model of the ZenPad S 8.0 that comes with 4 GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, USB type-C (although we’d rather have this model’s tried-and-true micro-USB port for now), 802.11ac WiFi support (this one’s unfortunately limited to slower 802.11n), and a faster processor for $100 extra. That’s a lot of upgrades, and in practice it is faster and more capable than this unit. But $100 is $100, and you still get the same look, feel, and display here. Go for the step-up if you need the higher-end performance, but the entry-level ZenPad is plenty fine as a budget Android option. The Amazon Fire is a tablet for people who don’t always use their tablets. In many ways, it's the Moto E of slates — a device that isn’t outright good in any one area, but competent in most, which in turn makes it a superb value for its dirt-cheap price tag. The Fire’s nondescript slab of black plastic neither looks nor feels premium, but it has a level of stability to it that other ultra-budget tablets lack. It doesn’t feel creaky or loose, and it’s proportioned well enough to use easily with one hand.Its 7-inch, 1024x600 display is as fuzzy as that resolution would suggest, but its colors and viewing angles are acceptable for casual use. Its 1.3GHz MediaTek chip and 1GB of RAM aren’t strong, but they do enough for basic web browsing or casual games to be relatively smooth. That’s in part helped by the Fire OS 5 described above, whose Amazon-pushing annoyances are easier to swallow at $50. It only has 8GB of storage but default, but that’s expandable up to 128GB with a microSD card, which is great.
It all adds up to something consistently usable, which may not sound like much, but feels fantastic for the money. If you just want the base benefits of a tablet for as cheap as possible, the Fire walks the ultra-budget line without sacrificing too much. As the founder of the design firm Fuseproject, he's the brains behind the Jawbone Up, the Jambox, the August Smartlock, and the XO Laptop, an ultra-cheap laptop that has made such an impact on the developing world that it's featured on Rwandan money. Each of Behar's products have a certain simplicity and elegance to them. You can sleep wearing the Jawbone Up, his firm's sleek fitness tracker, and the clean angles of the cable-free, portable Jambox wireless speaker make other audio equipment look clumsy.At the core of Behar's design philosophy is invisibility. The best products, he maintains, blend into user's lives rather than distracting from them.There are some things, psychologically and physically, that humans do well, and every time you have a product or an experience that lives within that flow, when you enhance somebody's feeling or understanding or comprehension of the world, you may have something that is successful, he tells Tech Insider. The rolling transit vehicle puts you a foot taller above everybody else, Behar says, so it distracts from the human experience. That's why it's a product that's mostly used by police these days. That one-foot difference isn't natural, it breaks the human condition, he says. When technology comes along with you, when it's more invisible, then it has a much bigger chance of being successful.Fitness trackers, which sold an estimated 70 million units worldwide in 2014, are far more popular than the Segway. One possible reason for their success: invisibility. The Jawbone Up, Behar's take on the wrist-worn tracker, was first introduced in November 2011. It lives on your body, you can sleep with it, it doesn't take you out of an interaction with another human being. that’s when technologies get adopted and people like them, Behar says.The device tracks steps and heartrate, like other fitness trackers. It's most exceptional feature: a data-mining service called Smart Coach that will crunch your stats to give you tailored advice — like when to go to bed to get the most rest, and how to optimize your workout. The Up becomes a mirror, Behar says. It becomes the way that people understand themselves better. And people love to more know about themselves, they love to discover patterns, they love to get insights.At the same time, Behar emphasizes, it fits discretely into your pre-existing life. It lives on your body, it's unobtrusive, and you can sleep while wearing it.According to a 2015 Rocket Fuel wearables survey of 1,262 consumers, the Jawbone lags behind the Nike+ FuelBand and Fitbit in terms of adoption. The Jawbone PR teams tells Tech Insider that we're seeing a strong growth in sales in the U.S. and internationally, and just launched in India last week, and that there's demand for new colors. The August Smart Lock is similarly invisible. As we've reported before, the battery-operated lock aims to replace the traditional door knob lock. It uses a Bluetooth app to talk with your phone to open and close the door. At the center of the August is the autolock feature, which automatically opens the door as you walk up to it and locks when you leave, with your phone vibrating or chiming to let you know that it's working. We want this to fit really smoothly into people's lives, Behar says. I haven't had keys on me for nine months now, and I would never go back — having to look for my keys and having no sense of control whether my door was locked or not.
First released in October 2014, August has now partnered with Nest, Comcast, and other connected home companies. To date, 20 million keyless entries have funneled through the August system.With the August, you don't have to pull your phone out of your pocket or fumble with your keys. You just walk up to the door.In many ways, he says, when we work on technologies, we like them to be invisible, and we like people to perceive and enjoy the experience, rather than the technological layer that was used to deliver that experience. There has been a lot of excitement around the release of Intel's new sixth-generation Core processor on Wednesday, but one particular industry may not be too happy about it: the tablet market.Intel calls its new chips, codenamed Skylake, the company's best processors ever, with significantly improved performance. It says they could deliver 2 1/2 times better speed and three times battery life, while offering 30 times enhanced graphics over the average five-year-old PC.Basically, it allows for the PC to cut its weight and thickness in half, while speeding up the overall performance. On top of that, it would have less heating, making some laptops go fanless, and almost no wires with its USB-C cable compatibility. In other words, the PCs with Intel's new Skylake chips could possibly look as sleek as some of the tablets, while providing the same type of computing power you would expect from any personal computer.It's taking the good parts of a phone and tablet, and then adding it to the benefits of a PC, Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights Strategy, told Business Insider. If Intel, Microsoft, and its big partners, like HP, Lenovo, and Dell, can get aligned, they will revive the PC market — and I do think it'll come at the expense of larger tablets.Moorhead said there had been a general conservativeness in the PC industry that caused most manufacturers to not be aggressive enough with their designs. But the new Intel chips will allow them to be more creative, and it is already being seen with some of the new Skylake-powered PCs scheduled to be released, he said.When you look at what is actually going to be available and what has been promised, I would say there is more alignment than ever before, he said. I think the Skylake is the PC industry's biggest opportunity in the last five years, and it's up to the players in it to take advantage of it. In particular, when Skylake is combined with Microsoft's latest Windows 10 operating system, it enables a lot of unique features, including facial recognition and wireless charging, which will only trigger more people to consider buying a PC over tablets, analysts say.The new features supported by Skylake, and in combination with Windows 10, will enable more attractive PC designs that will address today's needs better than older products, and compete better with tablets and phones, IDC analyst Loren Loverde told us.Now, it's the PC market's turn to come back with new features to differentiate it from the tablet market and give it a unique proposition that the tablet can't touch, another IDC analyst, Shane Rau, said.If true, the tablet market could be in trouble. IDC's latest data suggest the worldwide tablet market has been in decline, dropping another 7% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2015. Apple's iPad, largely credited with creating the tablet market, saw its sales drop another 18% in its latest quarter from the previous year, selling 10.9 million units, a four-year low. Its sales now accounts for only 9.1% of Apple’s overall revenue, and the unit is now a smaller business than the Mac products.
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