Okay so I am switching to engineering this year from Computer sciences (I want to do computer hardware engineering, not software) and I am getting a new device to accompany me when I have to go to university as my trusty Asus battery life is not enough for me to keep going all day.
So I have looked at multiple devices, I started out at the iPad Air 2 due to that A8X chip, but iOS is very restrictive and I cant stand having that on a tablet, phone its not too bad but tablet is a no go.
I then moved to Macbook Air, but its rather expensive and I want to stay on Android for my side device, plus I can use tablets rather well including multitasking.
So it has led me to this, a final confrontation if you will of devices that meet my requirements but vary in price, performance and usage requirements.
So my requirements are music, video, web, VNC, word processing and some gaming, nothing too intensive.
So first in line is the Nexus 9, reason for this is that K1, the thing is a monster, and I mean a monster and allow me to explain.
The K1 does not work the same as say an 810 but it can stand toe to toe with it despite been dual core thanks to the super scalar and how it deals with ARMv8 code, allowing for 7 instructions per cycle, which is rather impressive, aiding this is a massive 128mb cache on each core to store specially optimized code, this is all designed to offset the interpreter of ARMv8.
All this interests me massively, a draw for me to the K1 is the technology running.
Adding to that the massive 192 kepler GPU is a monster in gaming, as you can tell I find this processor kind of cool.
Second up is the Dell Venue 8 7000, powered by an Atom, it is rather fast in the CPU area, but a fair bit weaker than the K1 in the GPU area, this is using the same PowerVR as the A7 does, so by today its no slouch.
Both of these devices run around £300-£350, the main advantage for me with the Dell is the SD Card slot, but I have OTG adapters.
The next device is a laptop, specifically the Dell Chromebook 11 (Touch screen tough edition) this is around £229 so it is by far the cheapest of the bunch.
The Celeron is rather good for chrome OS, and the 4GB RAM offered will keep me running happily on Chrome OS, but my problem is its Chrome OS, I want some android games which of course I doubt even Arc can run most Android apps.
But the addition of KnM is a feature I would like to add to help with word documents and makes everything cheaper, more so against the Nexus 9 with the £110 folio keyboard.
So it comes down to this, which device would fit my needs best, should I actually splash out for a tablet and which one also? or should I get the Dell laptop, If I can I want to stay on Android mostly.
What would you recommend
Many Thanks!