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Comment by willtim | Hacker News Reader

Is there even an Android tablet market anymore? (Excluding Kindle Fire)

Chromebooks. £500 for a 14" touchscreen Android/Linux/Chrome browser on x86 with a nice lit keyboard... You don't save much getting a decent-ish tablet but without Linux/keyboard etc etc. Tablets - other than £150 or so ones you can throw in a bag and take on holiday - don't really make any sense any more.

As owner of an i5 Pixelbook, I was really surprised at how hot and noisy the thing became after 10 minutes playing Egg Inc. It's an interesting device (with Crostini) but not a very good tablet.

I don't use mine as a tablet (and mine is one of the ones where you can fold the keyboard right around), but it is good to have proper android support so I can use mx player to watch videos (with all codecs supported, unlike the chrome player), play lichess offline etc.

How did it get noisy without a fan?

Hmm! Maybe I am mistaken about the noise as I was pretty sleep-deprived at the time. It sure did get hot, though. I'll attempt to re-enact.

Oh, I believe that. My fanless MacBook gets unpleasantly hot enough during gaming that I've never bothered attempting any games on my Pixelbook.

Also convertible laptops. I use a Yoga Book [1] as a laptop when traveling, which is basically just a 10" tablet (and thinner than my old iPad!). My daily driver laptop also folds all the way back (and disables the keyboard) if I want a hefty ol' 13" tablet.

[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/51360191/...

I gave up on the android tablet ecosystem this year and got a Surface Go when I needed to replace my shield tablet K1. Local suppliers sold the same Android 4 Samsung tablets I had skipped over in favour of the K1 or Amazon's limited Kindle Fire devices.

It wasn't my first choice (I'd have rathered a 7-8" device, and windows application touch support is inconsistent), but the only other option was the iPad Mini and wanted a less locked down device.

In Europe there are plenty of Huawei and Samsung Android tablets to choose from.

On the other hand, they also have nice looking Surface like Windows tablets.

Personally given the whole story with updates (mine is stuck on 5.0) and crippling Java support, I rather go with a Surface like tablet or iPad.

Are these not available in the USA? Does Xiaomi make decent tablets?

To add to what dmix said,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab_series#Sams...

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 was announced on the 31st July 2019.

    Display: 10.5-inch 2560x1600 Super AMOLED
    Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 855
    Storage: 128/256 GB (expandable up to 512 GB)
    Memory: 6/8 GB
    Battery: 7,040 mAh
    Rear Camera: 13 MP wide + 5 MP ultra-wide
    Front Camera: 8 MP
    Dimensions: 244.5 × 159.5 × 5.7 mm
    Weight: 420 grams
    Price: Starts at $649.99

The question is, are they selling in large enough quantities to justify a market for software.

Yeah, virtually every app in the Play Store "may not be optimized for tablets". That disclaimer has become superfluous.

The market you refer to is dominated by Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, Spotify and maybe the Google Docs/MS Office apps. None of those require a pressure-sensitive screen and largely look and work the same way on mobile as on tablet.

Some iPad apps like Procreate and Affinity Publisher are designed for the pen, but considering that iPads sell in the tens of millions, I'd wager they make up a pretty small portion of the buying public.

Apple sells roughly twice as many iPads as Macs.

From a price/performance PoV I really liked the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1, but they no longer give it updates. Even LineageOS no longer does. An update with a similar form factor but a better resolution and a little bit more horsepower would be an instant "will probably buy" (I don't really need a tablet, and am trying to not get locked into Nvidia ecosystem, so those are for me two downsides of a new Nvidia Shield Tablet K1).

To be fair to nvidia, the 2014-2018 Android 5-7 support lifecycle for the shield tablet remains the best supported android device I've owned.

I wouldn't hold out for a successor though, Nvidia makes much of the internals of the Switch and I think another Nvidia branded tablet device would be too close to competition for Nintendo to allow.

My Fairphone 2 got 4 (and will get 5) years of support from a small company (Fairphone). Tablet-wise, I agree, although the K1 refresh got less long updates. Also, I don't expect a new tablet from Nvidia for the reason you mentioned. However the setopbox line I expect updates from (don't have one but heard universal praise). Thing is, I use a Steam Link and don't have Nvidia graphics card so no GeForce Now (don't like such vendor lock in either).

Samsung and Huawei sell more tablets than Amazon

Source?

Kindle Fire is dead fwiw. There were stats that Kindle line itself has slowed down but I don't know what the trajectory of iPads been like in the last two years.

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