Decisions, Decisions

daisy_knotwise always despairs of Christmas shopping for me, so I have given her a giant hint. My several years old Toshiba Thrive tablet has become a dinosaur which I seldom use, largely because it is slow and dim. Eventually, I will want to use the tablet for reading while I'm on the exercycle, because I will -- sooner or later -- run out of well-aged Time magazines. And I would like to use the tablet as a remote in the recording studio.

So Gretchen is good with the idea of a new tablet being my big Christmas present, but that leaves the question of what to get. There are a number of options:

Apple iPad Air: the older version of the tablet is cheaper. Also slower. But it's got a nice screen and reasonable battery life. Of course, I have virtually nothing running on the Apple ecosystem other than my largely abandoned iPod Touch.

Apple iPad Air 2: because newer is better. Or at least faster. But it's still not on the same ecosystem as the other devices around the house.

Nexus 9: also new, on the Android ecosystem and running the new Lollipop release. Largely comparable to the Air 2, but it's got a slightly smaller screen. A large screen is good, especially for reading on the exercycle and use as a remote.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S: bigger screen. And brighter. Only available with a limited 16 GB of RAM, but unlike the tablets above, it has an SD card slot. Loaded up with Samsung bloatware, but basically Android and it should get a Lollipop update soon.

High-end Chinese Tablet: you can get these with a big screen, reasonable RAM, and SD card slots. But which software will fail to run? And OS updates? Challenging, at best. But they're cheap, less than half of what you'd pay for the tablets above.

So I'm rolling the question around in my head.

What do you think?