Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
Yes, I agree that the manufacturers are trying to change the game and not sell tablets by specs (or even by obscuring specs). And it is a rather dishonest way of doing business.
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It's just as easy to be misleading with specs as it is without. Perhaps easier.
Is a 10.1" screen larger than a 9.7" screen? Is an 8mp camera phone better than a 5mp camera phone. Does a Xoom with 1GB of RAM perform better than an iPad with 512MB of RAM? Since some Android tablets support flash, should you get an Android tablet if you play a lot of flash games?
I do like to know specs, personally. But I also know that manufacturers tend to provide specs with no context, and that they are often used to compare things that can't be compared. Or that they just don't matter.
Back in 2003 or 2004, when the iPod was just becoming the dominant mp3 player, there were dozens of posts to usenet newsgroups (which still had some residual utility at that time) arguing that some other mp3 player was better than the iPod because it had more features, such as line-in recording or an FM radio...as if you could determine the best player by listing all of their features and the one with the longest list was the best. Ignoring the fact that: (1) virtually no one wanting an mp3 player had any use for line-in recording; (2) FM radios on MP3 players were horrible (I had one on my old Nomad II); and (3) for most people, iTunes (at that time a much tighter program) was vastly superior to the drag-and-drop software solutions other mp3 manufacturers offered almost as an afterthought with their players. And of course this was of much more fundamental importance to the actual experience with the player than the specs hyped by the manufacturers.
So, yeah, I'm interested in specs. But I also know that they can be very misleading when it comes to the actual use of a device.