Tablet Recommendation

[billbenson]

Wife is going to English as a second language '?ESOL' school. She wants a Dell. It has to be cool! I imagine she'll run win 8 on it. Cool is the most important criteria.

Realistically here needs are going to be Word documents and she loves to play with graphics. She's been using an old version of Paintshop. Any recommendations on an inexpensive image editor would be appriciated (not Gimp). She surfs a lot, but she closes tabs when she is done, so there isn't usually much running on the pc at one time. Oh, she watches a lot of videos.

So the tablet really doesn't need to be a powerhouse. Gotta be 'cool' though.


Really like Dell from the service aspect. It's worth the $200 to have a Dell tech come out to replace the mother board. You may say you have never had a mother board failure. My response is you don't have a spouse that tends to spill coffee, OJ, or other liquids on the keyboard

So, any recommendations?

[MyITGuy]

Since your pretty specific on Dell, and wanting to install your own photo editing app (I'm not sure what is in the MS App store yet)...then I would recommend the Latitude 10. A bonus to this model, is that you can pick up the dock and connect it to full size devices (Keyboard, mouse, printer(?) and Monitor)

Me personally, I will likely be waiting until the Surface Pro 2 is announced/released later this year (The keyboard/mouse cover are nice on the existing model...but the Pro 2 is supposedly going to have a docking option)...but by then more manufacturers may have similar functionality for the same/less price.

[carloborja]

I suggest you go with the iPad if "cool" is a major deciding factor.

After all, the iOS App Store has an app for almost everything. I am sure there a lot of Word Processing and Photo Editing apps to choose from to help her achieve all the tasks she needed to do with it.

[Wozcreative]

I like the look and feel, and fucntionality of the ipad.

If youre looking for stylus' though.. get Bamboo Stylus. I believe you can only get those on amazon.

[billbenson]

She's backed off from the pad idea. She wanted something for taking notes in an English as a second language (ESOL) class. She wanted something cheap because she's worried about it getting stolen.

To me, to take notes you want something with a keyboard. I think she is wondering about that as well.

Her laptop had a coronary recently. I need to buy a new laptop for her. If I buy a laptop, I would want a pretty beefy one so I could use it while traveling. I don't travel a lot, so that would be once or twice a year.

Which brings up a question - win 7 or 8?

[Freelancier]

Win7 unless you're going "all touch all the time." They're already re-tooling the UI because people without touch hate it and can't find their stuff.

Seems MS has a rule-of-thumb with their OS releases: every other one is good. We're in the bad release cycle now.

[MyITGuy]

I've been using Windows 8 on my personal laptop for the last few months...if you choose to go this route I would recommend picking up Start8 as well to get your standard start menu back. With Start8, the transition is much easier!

[LGCG]

I'm thinking about picking up a Kindle Fire for when I'm at home, but I don't really do anything much besides surfing the web. The only thing is I do like to do some blogging, so I'm curious how the Kindle works as a word processor.