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Asked: 2026-05-29T08:48:46+00:00

I want to target more of my Android development to tablets and I’ve learned

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I want to target more of my Android development to tablets and I’ve learned through hard experience with phones that there’s only so much you can do just in the Emulator – you need a physical device. So I want to buy a tablet to target and I’m looking for advice about how to select a good development target. So far the only thing I’m sure of is that it must support 4.0.

N.B. – I’m not buying this tablet for personal use, so it won’t be used for games, web-surfing, email, etc . I’m just asking for advice on what makes a good development target. Are there any characteristics or features of tablets that make them better or worse as development and test targets?

Thanks in advance.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Some thoughts: Samsung are apparently slow to push out updates. The new Transformer already has ICS. An SD slot is apparently a requirement for one-button rooting, if that’s relevant to what you want to develop. There exist pre-Honeycomb tablets that require a stylus and lack the Android Market (and therefore also other Google APIs): these are super cheap, and so may appeal to you, but you’d really hurt yourself buying one of these. The Kindle Fire is a pre-Honeycomb tablet that lacks the Android Market and many common features, but you might still consider it a worthy development target of its own. You might also develop for the BlackBerry Playbook, but I’ve heard that it’s more of a pain to develop for – in particular, that you need to sign your development apps with their online tool in order to run them on your own device.

    So, you have these general categories of purchase:

    1. “Garbage”, not even a useful platform for phone apps.

    2. “Honeycomb-to-ICS tablet with the Android Market and all the usual bells and whistles.”

    3. “Kindle Fire”, “BlackBerry”, useful for developing apps that will run on these particular devices.

    My advice: buy what appeals to you from category #2; you’re just not going to suffer particularly from any choice from this group. Keep #3 in mind.

    Rather: tablets differ by form factor, OS version, presence of Google APIs, and presence of other ‘value-added’ software. If you’ve decided on the OS version, then your only other question of any importance is “does it have the Google APIs”.

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