Need help choosing a tablet

Bodom

Bodom

Bodom

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19 Mar 2010
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Looking to spend up to a max of £200-£300 I have found a few that I like just need a bit of help making my mind up.

Samsung Tab S 8.4" £275.99 Good general all round performer good battery life amazing screen.

NVidia Shield Tablet 8" £239.99 Really good at gaming+ dose everything a normal tablet dose Battery life not quite as good and the screen isn't quite as good.

Kindle Fire HDX 8.9" £329.99 Really good screen overall good performance ok battery life, Slightly over budget but interested to here what you think.

Main things I will be using it for is reading listening to music watching TV programs and movies when I am traveling, streaming things to my TV, occasional bit of gaming and taking the odd photo every now and then.

Also interested in any other tablets you might think are good from around a similar price point.

Ty for your help.
 
I think for your uses there, mid range to high end, main stream brands should be fine. Stay away from the cheap chinese ones, i just have had terrible experiences with them.
 
Thanks still struggling to make my mind up though.

Any opinions from people that have used any of these, or suggestions on good alternatives would be appreciated.
 
im in the same boat too, got my finger on the trigger for either a 32gb lte nvidia shield tablet or the 16gb lte galaxy tab s 8.4.

i wouldnt consider the kindle tbh, too locked down and not all that mind blowing.

cost isnt too much of a factor for me as i can get both tablets for £300 for the lte versions, im just stuck with the gaming/quality quandry 0_0

hearing a lot about the corner cracking issues, poor wifi performance and weak battery for hardcore games on the shield tablet but on the flip side, the tab s has a slightly lacklustre processor (either exynos5 for wifi of snapdragon 800 for lte)

i already have a note 3 so the tab s would essentially be an 8.4" note 3 without the stylus and a few bells and whistles on.

at present, a bit of me says to go for the tab s.

reasons being:

mind blowing screen!
lighter
thinner
bigger display in a similar form factor
built in i.r blaster for tv control
nice build quality
can still use nvidia game streaming via "LIMELIGHT" which frankly is amazing!
good multitasking
fingerprint reader for security
1gb more ram than the shield tablet

i could go on,

like i said, my only reservations in reality, would be gaming performance for non gamestream games on the tab-s


DECISIONS DECISIONS!!!
 
Last edited:
Bit the bullet last night and went for the Galaxy tab s 8.4

In 2 words? NO REGRETS.

really beautiful device, great screen, so light, performance is just fine. so all in all im quite happy!.

ill probably chuck a review on here at some point but if it helps you make your mind up Bodom, then id heartily reccommend the Tab S.

the only reason i would reccommend the shield over this is if you are primarilly using the tablet for high end gaming (portal2, trine2, halflife 2, etc).

for all other gaming and also for using the nvidia gamestream facility via limelight, the tab s does this all perfectly. (heck, the tab s even runs some of my emulators faster than my SD800 powered note 3! - ppsspp runs amazing!)

any questions you have, just give me a holler and ill be happy to help!
 
Aikon359 said:
Bit the bullet last night and went for the Galaxy tab s 8.4

In 2 words? NO REGRETS.

really beautiful device, great screen, so light, performance is just fine. so all in all im quite happy!.

ill probably chuck a review on here at some point but if it helps you make your mind up Bodom, then id heartily reccommend the Tab S.

the only reason i would reccommend the shield over this is if you are primarilly using the tablet for high end gaming (portal2, trine2, halflife 2, etc).

for all other gaming and also for using the nvidia gamestream facility via limelight, the tab s does this all perfectly. (heck, the tab s even runs some of my emulators faster than my SD800 powered note 3! - ppsspp runs amazing!)

any questions you have, just give me a holler and ill be happy to help!
Click to expand...

Snap I went for the Tab S as well after reading more reviews :D, ordered it yesterday mine wont arrive for another week or so though.

Cant wait for it to arrive they do sound pretty awesome for the price, I think the only thing that lets it down is the 16GB storage, but that is easy enough to get around I bought a 64gb Micro SD card to go with it should be more than enough to keep me going for awhile :D

What's the battery life like on yours? they seem really good from the reviews especially if you turn off some of the extras like GPS.
 
Good choice dude, you will love it.

Got a 64gb Samsung uhs-1 in mine as I've already filled the bugger up already!.

As for battery life, nothing short of brilliant. Took mine off charge at 8am and have had everything on max including 4G, wifi, max brightness, gps, the whole lot. It's 2.30pm now and the battery is at 74% with average use.

6.5hrs and only dropped by 26%. I think with gps off and average screen brightness, you could get 2 to 3 days out of it at a time.

Liking that..? ;-)
 
Aikon359 said:
Good choice dude, you will love it.

Got a 64gb Samsung uhs-1 in mine as I've already filled the bugger up already!.

As for battery life, nothing short of brilliant. Took mine off charge at 8am and have had everything on max including 4G, wifi, max brightness, gps, the whole lot. It's 2.30pm now and the battery is at 74% with average use.

6.5hrs and only dropped by 26%. I think with gps off and average screen brightness, you could get 2 to 3 days out of it at a time.

Liking that..? ;-)
Click to expand...

Sounds pretty awesome to me, so you got the 4g version cool can you use it for making calls as well? i just the normal WIFI/Bluetooth version.
 
that was the other big bonus. unlike most companies, Samsung have a habit of NOT disabling the GSM capabilities of their SOC's which is great!

the Tab-S 8.4 LTE is fully gsm capable and has all the software in place already so its essentially an 8.4" mobile phone lol!!!. (ive actually used it to make a few calls and its actually not too bad)

comes in quite useful and on top of that, the Samsung SideSync 3.0 software works really well with my Note 3, so i can remote control the note from my tab and have it working like a "phone in a phone thats also a tablet" kinda affair.
 
It finally arrived today only had a little bit of a play around with it but I love it so far the screen is amazing, seems easy to use video play back is awesome the camera is ok as well.

The only downside is it came with what I think is either a Hong Kong or Chinese charger so I am having to charge it from my USB 3.0 port on my desktop, really not sure if this is a good idea or not so I am going to have to go and get a proper uk charger for it.
 
The Tab S loving it but defiantly going to have to get a proper UK charger for it just using the USB for charging is so slow even with it switched off it has charged 23% in 3 hours 15 minuets, it was shipped from Hong Kong took just over a week to arrive so not to bad overall just a bit of a pain about the charger.
 
bit of a bugger really. glad you are liking the tab though!. ive decided to root mine and chuck a custom rom on already and its performing beautifully!. (btw, is yours rocking the snapdragon 800? or the exynos Chip?)

BTW, there are a few really good chargers out there at the moment that im using for my tab-s that i could recommend.

one of them you can get from the ever popular forest site for about £14 and works brilliantly.

just look for: Swees® 50W 5V / 10A 5 Port USB Charger

5 usb ports and all auto sensing so when the tab is plugged in it will pull the max amount of amps.

these charge hella fast. i have 2 of the anker branded ones and swear by em. good for multi charging other devices too, so you can have your phone, tab, bluetooth headset, game controllers, speakers etc all plugged in at once.
 
Mine is the Tab S with the ARM Exynos 5 Octa-Core 1.9ghz and 1.3ghz, I got a good deal on it from the same competitor site that the charger is on couldn't find it any where else that cheap, it had Mandarin as the OS language and the Samsung Honk Kong app store as the home page lol.

Only problem I have had so far is not being able to stream shows off Amazon prime which from looking around there are workarounds for that

I will check the charger out cheers for that one :), been charging since half past 7 it was on 11% when I started, it is on 45% now lol, so 34% in 5 hours.
 
ouch!...

ill check next time i charge mine but IIRC it goes from about 15% to 100% in about 3hrs or less.

might be good to invest in rooting and chucking a custom rom on thats uk localised so you can stream properly. i can always chuck the links your way if you want?, im on the exynos version too so will be easy to do.
 
I think the problem with streaming TV shows off amazon prime isn't supported on the Samsung tablets even though I have the amazon and kindle apps installed reading up streaming option is only supported on Kindle Windows and IOS tablets, bit of a bummer but not really much of a big deal and I haven't tired any yet but there do seem to be a few apps you can download and mess about with to get it to work, not had any problems streaming with iplayer 4OD or youtube.

Which security software do you run on your tablets? using 360 at the minuet it seems ok but just wondering what you think?

Not sure about rooting really don't want to mess anything up lol.
 
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