Seriously, I'm trying to find one. Just a single one. One Android-based tablet product that isn't near the worst piece of crap ever made.

Asus' "Transformer Prime" tablet for instance: http://event.asus.com/ASUSPad/TF201GPS/ (I'm not sure anyone could have put together a more farcical site - I can't believe this is real). Even the name of that product screams "this is a piece of shit."

Anyway, primarily talking about tablets here as I'm looking for something for someone else. Myself, I wouldn't keep an Android tablet if it were given to me for free.

Why are you looking for one instead of just buying an ipad?

I have an iPad, my daughter loves it. Not everyone I know wants to drop $500-800 on an iPad, even though I've already warned them that everything else is shit.

Maybe if you gave more specifics as to what consititutes a "shit" vs a "not shit tablet" can make this a productive topic that provides you the information you need, rather than just a screed about one particular tablet based on their choice of web page design and product name with no reason given why that tablet is shit.

I think Bruno's pointing out that Asus is providing a free GPS dongle because the built-in GPS functionality is broken in some way. I have to agree that this is ridiculous.

Anyway, I installed CM9 on an HP Touchpad this weekend. That is actually the best Android tablet I've handled. It has subtle physical design, decent specs, low price, and gives the stock Android experience. Plus you can dual-boot with WebOS if you find that interesting.

I especially like the way they won't actually admit there is a problem with the GPS on the tablet and basically try and blame it on the users being fussy.

If the HP were still available, at the firesale prices, then I'd probably have recommended that, since as Rob says, it's pretty much the best constructed tablet out there apart from the iPad. The trouble is that it would then also require some hacking on likely an ongoing basis to run Android.

Heather, the ASUS comes broken from the factory. Instead of a recall ASUS is giving customers a sort of brick that must be physically attached to the device, occupying its expansion port and making it so that it won't likely fit into all its cases, etc. It's absolutely ridiculous. Apart from that we have tablets with abysmal screens, poor performance, very old software, won't be supported by manufacturers for more than a couple of months, etc.

There is nothing out there that comes in at even half the iPad in fit, finish, stability and performance, but I'd like to think that there's at least something out there that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the garbage.

Right now my recommendation is to wait until the next iPad is released and try and get the iPad 2 on super-clearance. They weren't so happy about that.

I used my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for at least 20 hours in the past week. I didn't realize that I was miserable from using a horrible, sh*t product that sucks in every way, but I guess I was wrong and Bruno was right. Then again, isn't it always that way?

Try an iPad Matt, then come back. Maybe the Samsung is the best Android product out there, but I felt there had to be something better. It doesn't speak well at all for other tablets if the Sammy is the benchmark...

The big issue with the Samsung is that it's the same price as the CURRENT iPad (and $100 more than the previous). And sorry, it's just not anywhere close to an iPad and there's no way in this or any other hell that it should command such a price. If it were $299 for the 16GB model then it'd be worth looking at.

Oh, and I've already spent waaaay too long researching this online only to come up with squat. Lots of "review" sites contain nothing but empty praise for every single Android tablet, even when they have a shoot-out of 10 of them. It's infuriating. There's promise of some lower-priced Samsun models in May, but who knows if they will even make it to market. The new iPad pretty much tossed the tablet market on its ass again.

If it weren't so small, I'd just tell them to get a Kindle Fire and STFU. It's slow, but at least it's cheap. Though it's also kind of small...

I find that annoying as well. But I’ll just not post to this, oh damn.

I feel sorry for all those who bought shit and are not stuck with shit.

It’s a shame I have to throw mine away I kind of liked it.

I have a Samsung Series 7 running windows and I'm happy with it. However, I value running Autocad higher than "Pull my finger"...

You feeling ok Rob ???

Cheers

Cris

So lets say an ipad is better than an android tablet but the ipad is a lot more money so isn't it ok if it's not as good then? Do you expect a ford focus to be as good as a audi?

I can't ever see paying 500 to 800 for a tablet for what I would use it for I would just rather have a real laptop but I would spend 100 to 200 maybe.

The issue is that many Android tablets are the same price or more expensive than the iPad.

The iPad starts at $399 right now. If I was asked to recommend an iPad, I would have.

Bruno - my problem is that I don't like iPads at all, and even my kids, when I took them to an HMV for a half hour to kill some time before an appointment) played with an iPad for a short while but were much more interested in the Samsung Galaxy and the HP.

I could say iPads are shit because I don't like them. They blatantly are not though, and they are right for a large population of the world - obviously.

For me and others, many Android devices are good. There are some bad ones - you have a wide range so there is a wide range of types, builds etc, as opposed to Apple, who can concentrate on one build (which they eventually get right after the first mistakes with each platform)

Apple just do too many things wrong with these devices for me to like them, so while I would recommend an iPad to someone like my wife, I wouldn't recommend it to any of my technical friends. The two that were early adopters have since bought android tablets as iPads restrict them too much.

As ever - YMMV, but be aware that others have different viewpoints to you.

There's always Windows Phone and soon Windows 8. Seriously anything is probably better than Android's horrendous interface. I haven't used an Android in a year and now if I picked one up I probably won't even be able to figure out how to make a phone call.

Aside from the fact that tablets don't generally make phone calls, is that Android's horrendous interface, or the telco's horrendous interface?

That's the reason I posed the question to the forum. I've only ever touched Android tablets that suck in too many ways to list them all. Bad screens, bad plastics, generally bad construction, insane prices, not enough storage, two year old OS, no OS update future, etc.

I don't care about walled garden opinions, that's besides the point, so I didn't even begin to talk about Android app distribution and UI.

But Bruno, so few of those are true of the Android devices I have used.

Screens can be on a par with Apple
Build quality can be much better
Pricing is cheaper for the same functionality
Storage is better than Apple (as you can use whatever memory you like in some of them - much cheapness!)
For OS updates - use Cyanogen: much more frequent updates than iOS

All of these are dependent on the provider, if you buy one that is locked in.

Oh, good god no - the W8 interface is one I hope to never have to use. My favourite interface for mobile devices was Nokia's, but my htc has an interface which is fast, intuitive and just plain easy.

Apple are good at the user experience, in terms of shiny - I wouldn't deny that - but so is Google these days.

Windows - not so much :-)

Agreed on the Windows 8 UI, but the Windows Phone UI (from the little I've played with it) didn't seem half bad.

I'm totally happy with my HTC Desire (running MIUI). It doesn't suck. At all.

I haven't played with WP7, but I still claim that the Zune HD had by far the best interface of any portable MP3 player. I sold mine recently, and I really miss the UI elements that thing had. I don't know how much of that carried over to WP7, but it looks like quite a bit to me.

However, there were constricting elements to the way interface was designed in everything but the music player, so I'd probably be hesitant to try WP7 based on that. Besides, I need a real GMail client on any phone I use...

I recently had a chance to play with the iPad 3 and I was really impressed with the screen. You could take a research paper formatted in 10-point type on U.S. letter paper and it's crisp and readable. Apple really knocked it out of the park with their screen.

So far, none of the Android tablets come close to this. Instead, the Android tablet universe seems to be going for minimum price point things like the Kindle Fire or oversized phones like the weird-but-popular 5" Samsung Galaxy Note.

Conjecture: Microsoft has announced that "Windows RT" will run on ARM processors, which probably implies that there will be a bunch of additional tablet-class products hitting the market soon. I'll bet that those manufacturers will offer Android variants as well. I expect the real rush of new products will be out in time for Christmas.

I'm probably not qualified to have an opinion since the only portable MP3 players I have used are an iPod Classic and a Rio Karma. (I don't count my iPod Shuffle which doesn't have a UI )

But the Rio Karma seemed pretty good to me...

tanstaafl.

The products were released six years from each other. That's like three generations of technology apart, so you get into the question of whether it was best of its own time or best because it was just the most recent.

But I urge you to play around with a Zune HD sometime if you get a chance. I adore that UI because neither form or function were sacrificed, and both were excellent. I think my favorite UI element was a very basic one, in that it took me an equal amount of time to get to any artist in my collection. There's an extremely short example of how it did this here (it'll be over in about 4 seconds). It really amazes me that all other players simply present your collection as one giant list, and insist that you use a search to get your music. That's much slower than the method the Zune HD used (and I assume WP7 phones use it too).

Anyway, I just wish I could skin the Android music player. It's pretty bad. None of these mobile platforms have a good default music player, frankly...

How is that popup A-Z list significantly different to the iOS approach of the A-Z list down the slide of a list that you can slide quickly down to jump to a letter ? iOS certainly doesn't make you search to navigate a long list of artists, tracks or albums.

You're not going to convince me that the existing/available Android tablets that I've seen/touched aren't shit. Every single one I've ever seen or read about leave my jaw hitting the floor as to how absolutely garbage they are (or "must be" in the case of the ones I've only read about).

That said, you don't need to convince me, because I'm not looking for something for myself. I've already got someone that's interested specifically in an Android product, I just need to help them decide which one. They already know/feel the iPad rules the tablet space, but they want what they want.

So can you mention any of these unicorn-powered products by name?

So far you've mentioned how some Android product matches the iPad in all these areas and is even better on price, so I'm really eager at this point to find out what it is, because I've certainly never seen or heard about it. But, don't break any NDAs if it's something still in development.

Honestly, I'd be thrilled to see somebody run Android on iPad hardware. Probably not happening any time soon.

It does surprise me that we haven't heard about that in the jailbreak community. Then again, I think most jail breakers really like iOS and especially what they can do once they have that wide-open access.

Android development on Apple's hardware stalled out long ago, due to the fairly different SOC and related parts. The community never stepped up to write the proper drivers. I've got an initial iPhone with the latest community Android release, 2.2, and still no power management at all. Battery will last all of 30 minutes booted into it. I don't think they got past the 3GS for anything basic.

Makes sense in a way, why bother trying to do all the really hard driver development when there is a ton of Android hardware to pick from.

The HP Touchpad used a lot of similar hardware to other Android products, and HP even released some of their work from running Android internally on the hardware.