Tip
The screen is more important than the performance of the tablet. Here are the characteristics to look for.
However you look at it, tablets are a mobile phone with a larger screen, and since most people need a mobile phone regardless, the larger screen is the tablet’s raison d’être.
As with mobile phones and televisions, screen size is measured in inches measured diagonally. There are some differences in shape, some tablets have more oblong screens, others smaller, which means that the measurements are not always directly comparable. If you are going to watch movies, you get a larger image per inch from a longer, narrower screen, while a smaller narrower screen may be better for working with documents.
You might think that the bigger the size of the screen, the better, but it’s not really that simple, because the bigger the screen, the heavier the tablet. The tablets with a really large screen are often so heavy that they become difficult to hold in the long run if you are, for example, watching a movie. Tablets can broadly be sorted into three size classes, with the classic format of 10-11 inches, the larger tablets with screens of 12 inches or more, and then a handful of more compact tablets with screens of around 8 inches.
The resolution of the screen also matters, and then it is perhaps most relevant in relation to the size of the screen. A measure to keep an eye on is therefore the number of pixels per inch, ppi. Screen brightness is another measure to keep an eye on. The higher the maximum brightness, the easier the screen is to use outdoors or near windows when it’s sunny. It is specified in nits, and sometimes for tablets you specify both typical brightness and so-called High Brightness Mode (HBM) which is only activated when you have set automatic brightness and it is really bright around the tablet.
There are two screen types for tablets. LCD screens can be said to be a large lamp over which you put a color filter where the colors can be changed for each point. It follows that it can be difficult to get the screen really black, and that the screen draws more power because you create a lot of light that you filter out. OLED screens, on the other hand, consist of tiny colored lights that form points of light. They often provide clearer colors, really black black and the plate gets better battery life. Unfortunately, when it comes to OLED screens in tablets, the development has almost gone backwards, and today you only find them in really expensive tablets from Apple and Samsung. Previously, you could get affordable alternatives with OLED screens also from Lenovo and Samsung’s OLED panels were cheaper.
If you are going to watch a movie, and especially in company, the speaker sound is also important. Basically all tablets have stereo sound and most have four speakers or more. As a rule, the more expensive the plate, the better the speaker sound.
Storage space can also play a big role. Especially if the tablet is to be used for games, it becomes important to have a lot of storage, and then a memory card slot cannot compensate for the fact that the tablet has too little internal storage.
The processing power of the tablets can vary wildly, but there are surprisingly few applications where it matters other than purely aesthetically, that it can feel a little disturbing if it takes a long time for the tablet to launch apps or if the games run with a slightly lower detail resolution. It is very difficult to assess the performance of the board’s processors based only on the specifications, and therefore we both describe it subjectively and report results from performance tests in our tests.
This is an excerpt from a longer buying guide for tablets, which was previously published exclusively for Plus members at Mobil.se. Here you can become a Plus member and thus get direct access to all articles on Mobil.se. As a plus member, you get collected tips and many other in-depth, guiding articles. You can find the entire original article here.