Its reasoning is pretty weird, though. Google's Pixel Tablet launched back in 2023, and it's been all crickets from the search giant since then on the...
  • cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Just because Google has doesn’t mean that Samsung and other Android OEMs have. They’re still pumping them out.

    Honestly though? What are the good Android tablets? How do you know?

    My wife only uses Android phones, and we went through 2-3 Android tablets. They all crapped out after like a year. Ones we thought were good. She never even considered the iPad, until I bought her one. Now it’s been like four years? It was new when we got it. Fourth-generation Air. Still runs good as new. Sure, it doesn’t run Android apps, you can’t put Nova Prime on it, and if that’s what you’re used to, well, the home screen kind of sucks. It’s good enough to get you into the apps though, which is where the iPad pulls ahead. And you get the benefit of the ‘other’ app ecosystem.

    For most people, the base level iPad is good enough. The Air and Mini offer premium upgrades over the base, and personally I think the Pro is overkill, but it’s also the biggest one, and some artists like that expanded canvas.

    Sometimes it’s good to use different tech. Android tablets have never been great. iPads have never been less than “good enough.” There may have been a couple Android tablets that were better than the base iPad, but they’d be few and far between and you wouldn’t really know until it had been out a few years.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      4·
      22 hours ago

      We’ve been using Samsung tablets in the family for the past 8 years and they are fine. Although it’s better to buy their premium tablets if you plan to use them for ~5 years.

      Some key benefits include adfree YouTube, having the same apps/UX on their phones (Samsung A series) and Firefox for Android with the UBO extension.

      • cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Yes, I love using Firefox on my Galaxy S10. iOS has uBlock Origin Lite and it’s fine in Safari but there’s just no point in using Firefox on iOS. And that’s sad.

        For ad free YouTube it kinda works but I’m sure it’s more reliable on Android.

        I used to root, and if you do that you can edit the HOSTS file or have something like AdAway do it for you. Unrooted Android is like iOS: DNS filtering. Though I don’t even do that on my S10, I just use Firefox and uBlock Origin.

        I should note, I don’t do tablets. My portable computer is a MacBook Air, and that runs Firefox with uBlock Origin just like Windows does, and Android. Wife doesn’t need all of a laptop, so she’s happy with the iPad. I don’t think I’ll ever get one, but if they made iPhone Mini Pro, I’d consider getting one and then getting an iPad Mini. 4” phone, 8” tablet, 15” laptop, 27” desktop monitor. But for now with a 7” phone I don’t need a tablet.

  • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
    44·
    2 days ago

    Just watch how in 1-2 years they’ll start another tablet initiative and it will fail because of their inability to execute over a long period without immediate unrealistic results.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      221·
      2 days ago

      Every 2-3 years some fresh exec at Google looks at the iPad market and nurses a semi at the thought of their bonus for eating some of Apple’s lunch. Surprisingly it turns out that you can’t just invent an iPad competitor from scratch in 6-9mo and have it be actually good, who could have guessed. Then it’s time to throw the entire product line out until the next guy comes along and does the same fucking thing.

    • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      yea, they probably will. i think a lot of people still clinging to a pc but not ‘needing’ windows-exclusive applications would seriously look at a tablet as their only ‘pc’ if it acted and worked a bit more like one when they want or need it to be one. it’s something both google and apple are working on, they just ain’t quite there yet.

  • arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    23·
    2 days ago

    Google is such a fucking joke of a company. They release multiple products that do the exact same thing regularly, have apparently no capability for long-term planning, and are just shoving AI into everything even if it makes the end product worse. Why would I purchase a Google product when anything that hasn’t existed for 10+ years is likely going to be axed in a couple years? The cherry on top is the idiot execs giving themselves raises for their shit performance while laying off workers.

  • maus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    It’s amazing. I am exclusively Android in all but Tablet because Google can’t figure it out and Samsung is… Samsung.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      2 days ago

      Samsung is kinda okay as long as you get something like shizuku and use that to enable root management of all of their utter bullshit. That lets you disable a whole heap of intrusive garbage and makes the device actually usable instead of constantly annoying. Rooting gives you even more options but then you have to deal with updating the fucking thing by hand using Odin and a laptop, and God help you if you don’t do it perfectly because it’ll end up needing to be entirely wiped.

      • kalpol@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        I will have to look but im pretty sure Lineage updates it self just fine on mine.

        Edit: so I was still on L20 which does seem to require wiping to go up a version. Let’s see how 22.2 does.

        • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          Ah, yeah, it’s a rare Samsung tablet that has real lineage support these days. The last one I used was the tab S5e and performance vs the S6 was so bad that I pawned it off on a relative within six weeks. I’m using stock OneUI with magisk on my S6 and S9 which means downloading the entire OneUI image from Samsungs update server, decrypting and splitting it, then patching with magisk and kicking it back over to the laptop to flash parts to the device with Odin. It’s a lot more work than updating an AB phone.

    • kalpol@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      A galaxy tab 6 with lineage is awesome, if you can score one that is unlockable. Their stock software is not great.

    • real_squids@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I liked lenovo but the last time I used them was 6 or 7 years ago. Back then their tablets had a really nice back texture, stereo speakers, 1080p ips, no bs, and all of that was really affordable. obv rooted mine but that was a very different time

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      It’s Google, they are too big to care about product quality beyond their mainline consumer products and enterprise.

  • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I had and loved both Nexus 7 models; used them for cell phones for a while, thru gVoice and wifi. They were great, with new tech. A family member still has theirs, and technically I still have mine, though with a broken screen. I used to carry it in my pocket, alright?

    Nothing else has interested me since. I’ve got a couple of Chromebooks (one of the '17 Pixelbooks, and one from Asus) and both are 2 in 1s… they are fine, but they aren’t N7s. Price went up, quality went down, up and down with no direction on wtf they were creating or the target market.