Laptop or tablet...?

getmore4less

Over the years I have settled on a different strategy as I no longer need portability for work tasks.

If your use cases need portable decent screen then I think laptop is probably the way to go over tablet.

for me I have settled  on this setup.
For real stuff sit at a desk and have a setup around desk base unit(s), multi screen nice keyboard mouse etc.

For portable I have gone down in size to a mobile  I tried a netbook for a while as I liked a keyboard but now I can manage on a decent ~6" phone and it fits in a pocket.

I do have a laptop(15.5") if needed but hardly ever gets used now.
Sometime I might open it up if needing to do something not so easy on the phone that needs multiple tabs visible and can't be bother to go to the room with the desk.
sometimes need to hook up the HDMI to the TV if there is something that won't pay on the TV browser/apps.

 

daivid

I have a brand new iPad air and a 9 year old HP probook laptop. Both are used for work and leisure. The iPad can do a lot of what the laptop can do some things better and one or two the laptop cannot (e.g. drawing, though with the right accessory the laptop could...). For leisure the iPad is better, for work the laptop is undoubtedly king, if I could only have one it would have to be the laptop, though if it fails I may consider a PC as I rarely move the laptop except to plug it into the TV for streaming. 

jimmtech1312

Hey, if you can raise your budget slightly to say £500 it will be well worth buying a laptop over a tablet. I own three laptops, ranging from a budget £500 laptop to a gaming laptop with a discrete graphics card and I also own a tablet. I can safely say, that I can do so much more and much easier with my budget laptop than what I can do using my tablet.

Although, the latest tablets have improved but they're not a scratch on a iPad but a decent iPad would cost way over your budget unless your purchased a refurbished iPad.

So, recommendations, I would suggest sticking with ASUS and yes I am a big fan. You see, ASUS are one of only a few laptop brands that are OEM's which means they manufacture there own laptops. Unlike others laptop brands were they  just stick there logo on the lid. For that reason, I think you will always get quality from ASUS at this price point.

My suggestions would go for one of the Vivobook laptops, possibly the ASUS Vivobook 15, you will get one with a nippy Intel i5 4 core 10th Gen mobile processor, 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD and 8GB RAM.

Alternatively, the HUAWEI MateBook D15 is the only other laptop I would recommended for this price. 

I hope this helps.

Sandtree

Deleted_User said:

Deffo a laptop. Tablets are toys and have limited support. 

Having worked for a company that replaced 95% of its laptops with Surface Pro tablets I would disagree that tablets are only toys and have limited support (not sure what type of support you were considering here). Obviously the Surface Pro runs the normal version of Windows 10 and so is a computer for all intents and purposes other than its tablet format.

If you ignore the likes of the Surface Pro, which is probably necessary in this case given budgets, then I'd certainly say I wouldn't want to only have a tablet even though I use my iPad 10x as much as I use our laptop. If you asked my wife she probably would say the tablet as she does a lot of drawing etc however would have a much higher preference for having both. 

Tablets are far from toys, but not yet a laptop replacement outside of the Surface. iPad Pro may be one to watch in the future now that the Mac computers and iPad Pro have the identical chipset. For now it means iPadOS applications can run on MacOS with the new chipsets but you'd imagine that in time the reverse will be true too... or iPad Pro start using MacOS rather than iPadOS

jamesd

Best to disregard writings about tablets being toys when your application is not at the high end. Instead, what do you do that would benefit from the tablet aspect, if anything? The screen size requirement is big for a tablet so a bit unwieldy. Do you need that size when moving around or could a combination of smaller screen when mobile and bigger monitor work for you?

My current "toy" has been my main computer for several years. It's what was originally a sub-£300 tablet with 13" screen and 3000x2000 resolution that's currently driving a HDMI connected 4k 48" OLED TV as its screen via it's mini-HDMI connector. Internal storage is 464 gigabytes of solid state non-SSD and external is currently 14 terabytes. CPU is only Celeron N3450 and RAM 4 gigabytes but it's entirely fine for my general uses including lots of game playing, just not first person shooter types. It's readily portable and the screen isn't too big to manage. Of course the screen and storage take it way outside your budget but those were addons that illustrate that tablets can have plenty of capability if used in the right situations.

Used tablets or laptops can offer considerably better value and capability for money than new. CPU hardware decoding for the AV1 video CODEC is possibly the biggest thing that new CPUs offer, for those who watch lots of online video via YouTube and the like.

jamesd

The Intel Quick Sync Video page tells you about the hardware decoding and encoding support of the various Intel CPUs. Yours is Ivy Bridge generation so it has:

Generic Ivy Bridge architecture:
MPEG2 hardware decoding and encoding support, gradually becoming obsolete but still lots around.
H.264 (AVC) hardware decoding and encoding support, very commonly used.

However, I see a note that QSV is disabled in the 200M from 2012 so those two seem not be present in your Ivy Bridge CPU.

HEVC (H.265) no hardware support, quite common in some broadcast applications.
VP9 no hardware support, most common high quality YouTube video CODEC today.
AV1 no hardware support, up and coming replacement for VP9.

If budget allows try for hardware AV1 decoding (needs Tiger Lake / Rocket Lake / Alder Lake generation or later), but at least hardware VP9 (Apollo Lake and later) and HEVC (Braswell / Cherry Trail or later) decoding if you can get it. It'll be hard not to get better CPU hardware decoding than you have now. Mine's Apollo Lake 2016 generation.

Tablets will have a lower CPU power budget than yours (35W), with mine taking maximum of 28W for everything built in including screen and often being below 5W actual power draw.

Tablets are likely to have soldered in RAM with no expansion capability, the most annoying limitation of mine. Laptops usually not.

elsien

Just to add, aside from the technical discussion, that the original post was back in March so they may well have made their decision long since.