Perception

When I wrote a small article about the new next Android tablet, the reaction was mixed. Some of you were optimistic that it may have a purpose, but others presumed it to be a very poor product because of the price and specs on offer. With no experience of the device whatsoever, the bar was set low in some people’s minds and thus it was dismissed out of hand.

The 3 hour battery life came in for criticism which is understandable when a simple comparison is made to the 10 iPad battery life. This was from people who consider that charging an iPhone every day, and sometimes more often, is perfectly acceptable. To me a phone needs a better battery life than a tablet because my personal tablet usage tends to be indoors where a charger is usual available. My phone usage can be anywhere and as such I need as much power as I can get all of the time.

The rest of the specs, and the device itself, seemed to come under scrutiny specifically against the iPad. Now, I consider the iPad to be good value at just over £400 and appreciate the screen, battery, build quality and availability of apps and media, but that does not mean that a product that is £180 will be discounted completely. Different people have different needs and different budgets. For example, my wife’s laptop has just died and now that she has completely her studies she wants a simple device to browse the web and view her emails- she sees no reason why the Next tablet is not capable of that. She is probably right, more on that in the review of the unit next week, and if she is the £180 is a small price to pay for a lot of functionality.

I am being a bit of a hypocrite here because I always want the very best smartphone available and I consider the iPhone 4 to be the best, but I’m not going to presume that a cheaper product, such as the HTC Tattoo, is poor just because it does not have all of the refinements of the latest Apple phone. I also do not believe that I ‘need’ an aluminium shell on every product and all of the other bits Apple throws at its products.

I wouldn’t go around calling someone else’s car rubbish just because it was cheaper than mine and so I wouldn’t do the same with a phone or a tablet. We all have different budgets, we all have different needs and we all like different things. Snobbery within the tech world seems like a strange development to me which is happening more and more.

It doesn’t really matter because people will always compete over the silliest things and there are much greater things to worry about, but cheaper products are built for a specific set of people (the majority) and we shouldn’t discount them out of hand just because they are not as well specified as the best products available.

All of the above was written before I received the Next Tablet for review. It has now arrived and maybe it isn’t the best example to highlight my point- the review will appear Monday.