Laptop vs Tablet...

James J

James J

James J

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Joined
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Basically, I'm really torn between buying a tablet like an ipad (probably version 1, not 2) or a decent portable laptop. Max budget I wanna throw at this is around £700 and I've seen a leveno (sp?) laptop which has just had its price smashed which is less in price than a MBA and seems to fit all the criteria, just never heard of the brand before and its brown :S lol.

My list of needs aren't amazingly demanding but here goes:

- light and good battery life
- no gaming requirements
- 128gb hdd min or a 64gb ssd with some form of backup drive, less on a tablet but probably 32gb min due to the amount of files I have
- 4gb ram min, 2gb just isn't enough anymore for pretty much anything :S
- fast cpu

Mostly gonna be used for lecture notes, reading papers and powerpoints and web browsing without being antisocial and using my main PC in my room. I live in a student house with 3 people and my room is really noisy and even though I'm literally 3 min walk from the uni campus, the library computers are so insanely slow I might as well not bother!

Problem is, I don't know anything about tablets like the ipad ect and the price ranges of the MBA's are pretty damn high, yet might stretch to it if theres quite literally nothing better. I use to own a 15 inch MBP 2010 model so very familiar with OSX so no issues there at all. However, due to being a keen photographer, I'd like to have a mobile backup for the laptop also if it uses a 64/128gb SSD for the main HDD as my main pcss 64gb M4 ssd gets battered by my photos after a heavy day taking shots (like 15gb worth of photos from 1 day... lol)

Options?
 
When IBM sold off their computer division Lenovo bought it, so your looking at basically a re-badged IBM.

If you plan to use your desktop for what I would call serious content creation then a tablet will be fine as a device to take notes, do casual surfing and consume media. It's what they were designed to do. E.g currently sitting in bed, reading and replying to forums on my IPad.

If,however you are wanting to do things like create diagrams, write essays, store all sorts of files then a laptop is a better bet.

For taking into meetings/lectures etc you'll find an iPad much easier to carry around and the battery will last all day. For doing assignments etc you'll still need a PC of some description.

With the budget you stated, you could probably get both.
 
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I've been considering the same, was looking at either the Motorola Xoom, Asus EEE Pad Transformer, iPad 2 or a notebook/sub notebook of some kind.

Then I was pointed in the direction of Lenovo and I really like the look of both the x121e and the x220.

The only thing I can see that one of those can't match v a tablet is battery life (although depends on battery, 6 cell and 9 cell options) and of course its not going to be as portable as a tablet, however personally I've had an 11-12" very light netbook/notebook before and never found carrying it to be any issue along with a 2.5KG Dell work laptop.

Also for reading the paper, books or magazines I think a tablet has the edge, I actaully purchased the Xoom for a few days and returned it because I found it too heavy to comfortably hold when reading a book via the Kindle App but I've decided just to buy a Kindle for that; which also has a much better screen for reading than any tablet.

That said magazines did look really good via the Zinio app on the Xoom.

Really it comes down to what you want to do with it, you mention your a keen photographer, as am I and that has coloured my thoughts a little, I first wanted a tablet for showing off photo's but for many tablets it seems to be a hassle to get the pictures on there in the first place, at least a notebook you can just stick the memory card in and transfer them over, also while there are some al-right editing tools for both the iPad and Android none of them is going to come close to Lightroom/Elements or Photoshop which should run fine on anything with at least an i3 processor!
 
Ultrabooks basically are set to be Windows Macbook Airs, very thin and light, powerful machines, due for launch soon. Most of them look like they will have powerful i5 processors, Acer and Asus look like they will be first out of the trap, they do seem pricey though with a price point of between £800 and £1200
 
Asus are due to reveal theirs on Tuesday in New York, personally I'm on the fence between a tablet or the Lenovo x121, I know that anything I buy now (x121, Playbook, Xoom) is likely to be superseded within the next 6 months but price wise they have came down a helluva lot from new so I feel less bothered about buying something as an "interim"
 
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