[General Questions and Answers] Joe-Kerr:
Choosing the perfect tablet.

Good moaning.

I've been, for quite a long time, thinking of acquiring a tablet to use mainly as an e-book. Unfortunately personal finances, and thinking that it'd be terribly wasteful not to squeeze the most out of the device, has kept it from being more than a mere wish all this time. But I've decided to screw that, and just dive head-on.

However, my financial situation still isn't particularly fine, factor in that I am a disciple of the Mr Krabs school of economics and I'd like to save every penny I could.

What exactly do I want from the tablet? Well the main use I'd be giving it is as a reader, anything else would be secondary. For example (and this shows how much of a nerd I am) I have a bunch of RPG manuals that i'd love to be able to read without needing to zoom in. I'm talking large books almost A4 size, with two colum text (Oh, btw, for any rpg geeks out there, if you haven't already, pick up the pathfinder core rulebook off Humble, there's still 3 days left). What I want is: a device that can fit the whole page in the screen and still lets me read the text without having to squint and press my nose to the screen. So after some investigating I found out about the Teclast, the Onda and the Cube tablets with 4:3, 9.7" retina screens and thought 'jackpot'.

And of course I then found out about the dual boot. Which opened a whole new world of possibilities. My first thought was about being able to play visual novels on a tablet without the need of an interpreter (yes I'm a total nerd). I had played Tsukihime on my phone and became convinced that a tablet is the perfect environment for this sort of entertainment. So the idea of being able to play Fate/SN on a tablet, natively, almost made me giddy. Of course storage space is a problem, a 32G dual boot tablet fills up really fast. However the upgrade to a 64G one is substantially more expensive, and since I want to save as much as I can, I'll just have to endure it. But I digress.

Thing is, I was centered exclusively on the 9.7 inch screens and couldn't quite make the commitment. Until someone the other day pointed me at the Chuwi Hi8. It's smaller at only 8 inches, has a 16:10 form factor, which I'm not crazy about. but has a nice high resolution and it sells for right under a 100$. And I was left wondering how well it holds against the A4 two colum text pdf test I mentioned earlier. Would I be able to read the text clearly when fitting the page to screen size? I've also been told that there are other 8 inches 4:3 form factor tablets out there. How would they fare in comparison?

So, to sum things up. I'd love a tablet for reading my pdf roleplaying books. Since this is a vanity item on a whim, I want to save as much as possible, meaning I wouldn't mind too much losing some processing power or storage space in the process. What would the best device be? I'd prefer 9.7" but can I make do with a 7.9" device? 4:3 factor is a must. The dual boot feature of some tablets looks nice, but can it be more of a hindrance than an asset due to filling up the internal storage? I'd love to hear your informed opinions and thoughts on this matter and help me decide on which one is better suited for me.

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PS: I've been thinking of teaching myself python. Are there any friendly, python for learning noobs projects on Android I should know about?