Laptop or iPad?

[Pengi]

If you do decide to buy an iPad, then do check out the refurbished store as there are savings to be had

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/specialdeals/ipad

[red_death]

I take the odd photo on my Iphone but even with the newest one the camera quality is pretty poor.  Can't imagine it is much fun taking a photo with an Ipad though I saw enough trying to at the Olympic stadium - personally I was glad I had my SLR with a nice lens!

If you are umming and ahhhing between a laptop and tablet then take a look at the Asus Transformer series with their docking keyboards (which also has an extra battery in) as this might be the solution for you (or wait for the MS Surface!).

[longbridge]

My Nokia N8 smarty phone will do just about everything I need, 12mp camera with Carl Zeiss lens, HD movies, in camera photo editing, MP this and MP that, plus internet connection, thinking of giving the desktop the flick.

[Pengi]

Some information about Office files and iPad/iPhone/Macs

The following link contains some information about transferring files between Apple's iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) and Microsoft Office. It is an old link but quite a bit of what is says still holds true. Office users cannot open iWork files however you can export the files into an Office format but you do lose some of the formatting. iWork will open most Office files except Powerpoint files of the type *.potx. Personally, I prefer Pages over Word but Numbers is not as comprehensive as Excel particularly as it doesn't have Pivot tables (so I ended up having to get Office for Mac)

At the moment there is no version of Office for the iPad. The iWork suite is a lot cheaper.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1133922/iworkoffice.html

You may also encounter winmail.dat attachments from Office users which cannot be opened by a Mac user without an app (I cannot open a winmail.dat file with Office home and student edition - not sure if they open if you have Outlook for Mac).

The link below explains and gives more information and details of apps that will open winmail.dat files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulation_Format

[BobB]

We have just gone through a process of finding out which tablet to use or if we should stay with laptop / netbook computers. We had an imperative that we needed to send and receive M/S office files (Word almost exclusively) to clients.

It took us a couple of weeks to reject the iPad because we couldn't get support for a folder tree or structure that PC's have, this rendered the device useless for our needs.

The we tried the Galaxy tab 10.1. Good file handling but none of the free applications nor those that we paid for were entirely compatible with office files. We abandoned the Android platform as a result.

Thinking that we would stick with portable PC's of one form or another, the third round of trials led us to a small group of tablet style machines that ran M/S windows and Office. Most had small (underpowered ?) processors which were slow and messed up pen/stylus input. In the end we found a computer that did everything we wanted :

Samsung Slate 7. It has an i5 processor, comes with a dock and good keyboard and can be expanded. It seems to do everything without compromise. The only downside is the cost compared to other stuff. I suppose it could also be used for 'phone calls but at 11.6 inch screen size, don't expect it to put it in your pocket.

Hope this helps rather than confuse.

BobB

[Flakmunky]

As you are buying this device for a member of the family in full-time education, ask about educational discounts. I believe Apple do these.

My colleague also got a further discount (for his Macbook Aur) by signing up for the warranty which you can then later cancel...

[Flakmunky]

As for image making (as opposed to image taking), Autodesk's Sketchbook is about the best there is but it is severely hampered by the lack of pressure sensitivity...

iMovie is a fantastic video editor if you exclusively use iPad / iPhone video... I use it a lot for work...

Quick Office has excellent Office compatibility (on both Android and iOS) and supports folder trees. Or am I missing something?

[BobB]

Hi Flakemonky

From memory, quick office could not show words that had a vertical direction within a "Word" table's cell. This messed up the format of any of the forms that used this technique and looked absolutely terrible. I don't think our clients would have appreciated receiving them !

I don't think we succeeded getting the iPad to use folder trees in any of the software but I'm not sure if quick office was one that we trialed. It was a few months ago so my memory may be at fault.

We have now deleted all of the applications from the Tab but there may be light at the end of the tunnel, a close friend's son reckons he can sort out the compatibility problems. Whilst we await with interest, in the meantime we're using the slate 7.

The frustrating thing is as far as computer and/or software are concerned is that almost all "experts" seem to want to sell their product or services yet none seem to collectively know enough to do a comprehensive job when selecting the best solution to a defined set of requirements !

Bob