Throughout all of last week I have discussed The HP Slate, The JooJoo, The Dell Mini 5, Archos 9, and The Apple iPad as to find out which tablet would serve a photographer best. Now all these tablets have a usefulness to them, none of them is without any worth, however from a photographer’s point of view some of them do not stand up to what we need from a Tablet PC. Here are my final thoughts.
First, we have the Dell Mini 5. The Dell Mini 5 is a great looking tablet. While not pocket sized it is a bit bigger than the iPhone. In fact it doubles as a phone. What I liked about the Dell Mini 5 is the Android OS. The reason being is, like I said in the article, the OS has a lot of potential within it, in addition to the fact that Android is going to become Flash compatible before the first quarter of this year is up. However that doesn’t mean much when it comes being able to edit photos on the Mini 5. The screen is just too small to be used, and even if we had the tools (software) to edit these photos I feel like the menus and icons in programs such as Photoshop would be so clunked together that you would get a headache every time you went to edit a photo. Unfortunately, this means that the Dell Mini 5 cannot meet our needs as photographers.
Next is the Archos 9. Powered by Windows 7, the Archos can run countless pieces of software as long as the processor is able to withstand the demand of resources. Unfortunately, the Archos suffers the same fate here as the Dell Mini 5, as the screen is again just not big enough to be able to comfortable and seamlessly edit photos as if it were on a PC or Mac.
Next is the JooJoo. The JooJoo would be perfect for photography if it was not a tablet made for web browsing only. In addition to this, even though I mentioned in the article on The JooJoo that photographer’s could always resort to Photoshop.com, another issue is simply what if no internet connection is available where you are? I know most coffee shops nowadays in NYC provide wireless access but there are still some spots where internet is just not a possibility. As photographers we would need something that is accessible always, and if we cannot get an internet connection, then unfortunately The JooJoo is out of the question.
The top spot in the round up is a tough call. For years, PC fanboys and Apple fanboys have debated on which OS is top knotch and now we bring it over to the tablets so the endless debate can continue being endless.
The reason why the HP Slate and Apple iPad share my number 1 spot is because both tablets hold a lot of potential to them. The HP Slate running Windows 7 gives the Slate a big advantage of being able to run in numerous amounts of programs. The same for the Apple iPad, with the same OS as the iPod Touch, the iPad has the ability to run countless apps from Apple’s app store.
The most important part of these two devices however is their screen size. As I have said from the beginning, even when I first mentioned The iPad I said screen size would be key. The screen size of these two tablets is prime for any kind of editing, and they are not as hard on the eyes as smaller screens are. Another reason why they make the top of the list is because of how much area there is on the screen to comfortable run these editing applications without any clutter, constraints, and headaches.
So it all boils down to you and your personal preferences. Which would you prefer?
