What Android/Windows tablet should I buy for academic use?

Hand down the answer is http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productID.275287500 with http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/accessories/type-cover-2, not the old clicky one or the touch cover. Total cost: $600 + $120 = awesome Key features: Full productivity software Windows 8 is actually a good tablet OS Pressure sensitive pen, not capacitive (1024 levels of pressure) Great handwriting recognition Can emulate Android if you really want to Now with backlit keys! Good for probably the next one or two versions of windows, at least Lame things: It's last year's version Slightly heavy (still really light, though!) You may realize you're not a good digital artist even if you have all the right tools, and grow despondent

Mendeley and Papers are two of the better and more broadly-used academic journal article management and annotation apps, but are iOS-only. iPads are also generally better at rendering more complex PDF journal articles than equivalently-priced Android devices. This is testable by putting PDFs of interest on the web and viewing them on store models at an Apple Store and an Android- or Microsoft-equivalent (Microsoft store, campus bookstore, etc.). Do not buy an Android device cheaper than $300 unless you are prepared to cut corners. Amazon's Kindle Fire is an egregious offender, even after replacing the stock OS with something newer. But whatever you buy, there is so much variability in performance with third-party devices that it is probably worth the effort to get your hands on a few test models and work with the documents you'll be reading. An iPad Air with a https://clamcase.com would be a nice complement to either of the aforementioned reader apps. If you want lighter weight, go with an iPad mini Retina with the smaller ClamCase keyboard equivalent. Wacom makes a stylus called "Bamboo". It is not active, but it still works well for its intended purpose. Cregle makes something called "iPen 2", which is active, but requires an attachment to the iPad Air. It does not look like they have a stylus out yet for the iPad mini.

There was a similar question that you might find http://ask.metafilter.com/254509/Low-cost-tablets-for-academics.

I don't know what your academic discipline is, but beware: in my experience, Android can be a bit shit when it comes to displaying special characters. Specifically, there is no support for polytonic (ie, accented) Greek characters - so it's piss-poor for classicists. For this reason you might like to get your hands on such a device and make sure it's capable of displaying all the special characters you'll need before you make a commitment.

I got an iPad for academic papers due to the Retina screen. It displays papers beautifully. Very easy on the eyes, and the difference is noticable. Otherwise, I would have gone with a Nexus. I have a Nexus 4 phone and it is lovely - just obviously not a tablet. So as far as screens go - go to a store like Staples and check for readability.

Fermion, I asked her and she hasn't had any kind of lag. She uses it for PDF markup for business school, so it's a comparable use case. The wi-fi seems faster on her tablet than mine too. Sorry for the delayed response.

I got a chance to go to a big-box office store today and try out a few tablets--unfortunately their wifi was spotty, so I didn't get to check pdf rendering on all of the different options. They didn't have the Galaxy Note 10.1, but I did try out the stylus on the Note 8, which further convinced me that I want something with good stylus support. I'm also pretty sold on the necessity of high pixel density. I didn't much like the interface on the Windows 8 tablets, but that's probably just unfamiliarity talking. KevCed, I've read a few reviews that say the Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 can be kind of laggy, especially for something that's supposed to be pretty high-end. Do you know if your fiancee has had any trouble with that? RedOrGreen, I appreciate the perspective from someone who's had the same concerns about iOS. Maybe I should borrow someone's iPad and use it for a while just to see how it goes. As far as non-iPads, sounds like I'm down to the Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 or the Microsoft Surface, with the Galaxy Note having the edge on resolution, pen integration into the OS, and weight, while the Surface has more raw power.

I like my Galaxy Note 8, the SPen really is pretty awesome. I have a 5 year old Lenovo PC that you could write on, but it's much heavier and nobody else knows how to use it (this is suprisingly annoying). For references, I used to use Mendeley but it doens't have a good Android app (they're all 3rd party and their interface doesn't allow third party apps to e.g. sync annotations). I'm in the process of switching to JabRef which interfaces well with the bibtex I use for writing papers, but I haven't found a favorite android app for it yet. So right now I'm using drobox and ezPDF for annotating and reading on the tablet. It's smooth, fast, and just right for me. I like the 8" size for portability; I have a big screen at home and at work, and travel with a laptop for actually typing papers. The tablet comes with me to meetings and talks so I don't constantly run back to my office to get a copy of that one paper I need right now. I don't use it for *writing* though, just for annotating papers and maybe looking up things while I am writing on another machine. I have had no issues displaying any equation I've needed (I'm a physicist who also has to read math papers, and is currently learning some Danish; all of those render just fine for me).

You have lots of decent options in this thread, and I don't have any specifics to add. I'll just address this one thing: I like having options and I hate running into arbitrary limitations on what I can do with my device. On the other hand, tinkering is not a huge part of my day-to-day computer use, so maybe I overestimate how much I would miss it? As a hardcore Linux nerd once upon a time, this was my exact worry about switching to OS X a decade ago (gah, really? a decade??). I found that I valued the saved time and reduced headaches more than the loss of freedom, and as time went on, that became more and more of a valuable trade-off. Not having to worry about ALSA Sound or my wireless card driver for every point update to the kernel (Debian, of course - this was before Gentoo) trumped my concerns about non-Free Software. It helped that all my professional software was still hand-compiled with gcc on my laptop - but these days, I get a sinking feeling every time I have to update packages on my Linux workstation (CentOS, now) and I would not trade in my shiny MacBook Air for the world (or until OS XI moves to iOS, or something equally egregious). For my phones and tablets, not only do I want it to work, I want it to work smoothly and seamlessly and delightfully, with zero friction. I pick up my phone to sneak in a minute of activity at a time, and I never want to encounter a rough edge that breaks the flow. I don't really miss tinkering with my operating system, I've never jailbroken iOS, and while I'm very happy that Android exists and I'm cheering it on (competition is the only thing keeping Apple honest, and having a viable fallback option is important), based on my small tastes so far, I have no interest in switching to it [*]. So what I'm saying, I guess, is that you should think about whether you will value your tablet primarily as a development / hobbyist platform, or as a tool to get other stuff done, and how that value to you will evolve over time. There's no wrong answer, just different trade-offs. [*] As a total aside, I'm creeped out a bit more every day by the all-seeing Eye, but that's a different digression.