How to choose a tablet | Articles | Phones

A tablet is a portable device with a touch screen of 7 inch­es or more, with an oper­at­ing sys­tem that allows you to install pro­grams.

Tablet com­put­ers appeared a long time ago, but became a tru­ly mass device with the advent of the first gen­er­a­tion of the iPad.

The advan­tage of a tablet over oth­er devices is that, on the one hand, it is com­pact enough to car­ry it with you with­out think­ing about weight and size, and, on the oth­er hand, it is con­ve­nient for watch­ing videos, read­ing books, in a word, every­thing that requires big enough screen.

Mod­ern tablets are usu­al­ly devel­oped on the basis of the same oper­at­ing sys­tems as smart­phones, albeit with a slight­ly more com­pli­cat­ed inter­face.

The main char­ac­ter­is­tics that you should pay atten­tion to when choos­ing a tablet:

Screen size

Tablets, unlike smart­phones, are not hand­held devices, and there­fore the screen sizes here can be very dif­fer­ent.

The min­i­mum dis­play size of a tablet is 7 inch­es — any­thing less is con­sid­ered a phablet (a hybrid of tablet and smart­phone).

Tablet Sam­sung Galaxy Tab A 7.0

The next size — 8 inch­es, allows you to make the device quite com­pact, and at the same time func­tion­al. This for­mat has, for exam­ple, iPad mini.

Tablet Huawei Medi­a­pad M3 Lite 8

10 inch­es is a “large” tablet for­mat, con­ve­nient for work­ing with graph­ics, watch­ing videos and oth­er work that requires good vis­i­bil­i­ty of the image.

Tablet Leno­vo Tab 4 TB-X304L

12 inch­es and above — the for­mat of pro­fes­sion­al tablets that can replace a lap­top when work­ing with appli­ca­tions. How­ev­er, such a tablet is equiv­a­lent in porta­bil­i­ty to a small lap­top.

Tablet Apple iPad Pro 12.9

As you can see, each for­mat has its advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. The size of the tablet is select­ed indi­vid­u­al­ly, for exam­ple, a child will be more com­fort­able with 7–8 inch­es.

Screen resolution

Of course, a large screen on any device con­tributes to the view­ing expe­ri­ence. But in addi­tion to the size of the image, its qual­i­ty is also impor­tant.

The main char­ac­ter­is­tic that is respon­si­ble for the qual­i­ty of the image on a dig­i­tal dis­play is res­o­lu­tion.

Res­o­lu­tion is the num­ber of pix­els used on the screen (expressed either as pix­els per inch or as the num­ber of hor­i­zon­tal pix­els times the num­ber of ver­ti­cal pix­els).

Accord­ing­ly, the high­er the screen res­o­lu­tion, the more detailed pic­ture it can poten­tial­ly dis­play.

Operating system

An oper­at­ing sys­tem is a soft­ware pack­age with which the tablet works. The inter­face, ways of down­load­ing files, installing pro­grams, in fact, all the main actions depend on it.

The main oper­at­ing sys­tems that are used in tablets are as fol­lows:

Android

The most ver­sa­tile oper­at­ing sys­tem, spread thanks to the giant Google. The advan­tage of Android is full cus­tomiz­abil­i­ty, inte­gra­tion of the main Google appli­ca­tions, the abil­i­ty to upload any files.

iOS

Used by Apple in their devices, it is high­ly sta­ble, secure and has a beau­ti­ful inter­face.

Windows

It is char­ac­ter­ized by an inter­face sim­i­lar to the one you see on a reg­u­lar per­son­al com­put­er, how­ev­er, the capa­bil­i­ties of desk­top Win­dows are present here in a some­what trun­cat­ed form.

Battery capacity and battery life

A tablet is a device that is used to watch videos, play games, and do oth­er tasks that require a lot of pow­er. There­fore, the bat­tery capac­i­ty is very impor­tant for him, the larg­er it is, the longer the device will work with­out pow­er from the out­let.

Most often, the bat­tery capac­i­ty is indi­cat­ed in ampere-hours, for exam­ple, for 10-inch tablets it is 7000 mAh and high­er.

Apple indi­cates the capac­i­ty in watt-hours, which is a more cor­rect approach, since this indi­ca­tor takes into account the volt­age (we all remem­ber from the school cur­ricu­lum that elec­tri­cal pow­er is equal to the prod­uct of volt­age and cur­rent).

Performance

The full name of the devices in ques­tion — “tablet com­put­er” — already indi­cates that this is a com­plex device that has a com­put­er archi­tec­ture with all its inher­ent attrib­ut­es — a proces­sor, RAM, and so on. Let’s take a look at these com­po­nents.

CPU

The proces­sor is the “brain” of a portable com­put­er that per­forms the cal­cu­la­tions on which most oper­a­tions are based. Any pro­gram con­sists of code that is exe­cut­ed by the proces­sor. For a mod­ern tablet, sim­ple oper­a­tions will be work­ing with text, arith­metic cal­cu­la­tions, brows­ing the Inter­net, play­ing music. All these tasks can be per­formed with­out prob­lems on a weak proces­sor. A more dif­fi­cult task is, for exam­ple, three-dimen­sion­al games — they use the proces­sor “to the fullest”.

To com­pare two dif­fer­ent proces­sors with each oth­er, you need spe­cial appli­ca­tions called bench­marks, such as AnTu­Tu Bench­mark. They eval­u­ate the pow­er of the device in some con­di­tion­al points, a high­er num­ber of which indi­cates high­er per­for­mance.

RAM

All files and data of pro­grams with which the tablet is cur­rent­ly work­ing are placed in RAM. Mea­sured in giga­bytes. It rarely deter­mines the per­for­mance of the tablet, but oth­er things being equal, you can take it into account. RAM is the eas­i­est char­ac­ter­is­tic of a tablet to under­stand: the larg­er it is, the bet­ter, the tech­ni­cal details of its design are not so impor­tant.

Persistent memory

Read-only mem­o­ry is used for stor­ing files and installing pro­grams, as well as for the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself. If the tablet is con­stant­ly con­nect­ed to high-speed Inter­net, and you watch stream­ing video on it and lis­ten to music from the Inter­net, then per­ma­nent mem­o­ry is not so impor­tant. Oth­er­wise, we rec­om­mend not sav­ing on per­ma­nent mem­o­ry.

Housing materials

When buy­ing any device, not only its char­ac­ter­is­tics are impor­tant to us, but also its appear­ance. Only man­u­fac­tur­ers of unnamed devices from Aliex­press now save on the qual­i­ty of mate­ri­als.

In bud­get tablets, the body can be made of plas­tic. We all know the advan­tages of this mate­r­i­al: it is easy to give it any shape, col­or, tex­ture. How­ev­er, plas­tic is short-lived and frag­ile.

In the high­est qual­i­ty tablets, met­al is used — it is wear-resis­tant, looks sol­id and gives strength to the case.

Additional features and connectors

Of course, all tablets have a head­phone jack and USB for con­nect­ing to a com­put­er.

Also, mod­ern tablets are charged via USB-con­nec­tor.

OTG function

This is a fea­ture that allows the USB of the tablet to work as a uni­ver­sal USB con­nec­tor for var­i­ous devices. Through a spe­cial OTG cable, you can con­nect stor­age media, a com­put­er mouse, a modem and oth­er periph­er­al devices to the tablet.

HDMI output

The HDMI con­nec­tor is a pop­u­lar high qual­i­ty dig­i­tal out­put. Allows you to out­put the image from the tablet to an exter­nal dis­play with an HDMI input (TV or mon­i­tor). For exam­ple, you can run a video on the device and watch it on the TV screen using the tablet as a media play­er.

Memory card slot

Do you like watch­ing movies, lis­ten­ing to music, down­load­ing them as files and sav­ing them on your portable device? Then the pres­ence of a MicroSD slot for mem­o­ry cards will allow you not to run into a sit­u­a­tion where the tablet’s mem­o­ry is full, you feel sor­ry for delet­ing some­thing from there, and there is nowhere to upload a new one. It will be enough to buy a USB flash dri­ve and insert it into the tablet.

Transformer

A trans­former is called a hybrid of a tablet and a lap­top, in which a dock­ing sta­tion with a key­board can be attached to the tablet.

conclusions

The iPad was not the first tablet, but it was he who opened this class of devices to the mass­es. He formed their main fea­tures: touch con­trol, the use of a mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem, the high­est qual­i­ty dis­play.

Now, per­haps, every­one has man­aged to try out this class of devices: for some it turned out to be indis­pens­able, but for oth­ers it is not real­ly need­ed. But in any case, tablets are the most pro­duc­tive and tech­no­log­i­cal class of portable devices.