Been reading the thread and may have missed it but here are my thoughts.

If you are buying an Ipad get a mini with cell availability so you have GPS No need to spend the extra money activate the cell service as you can get wx updates free via a ADS-B receiver AND also by making your phone a hotspot and connecting to the ipad do the same thing.

This seems like an ipad-specific discussion, droids need not apply. But...
FWIW I bought a Samsung droid tablet a couple years ago for sectional / moving map GPS use in my airplane.
I use the free (droid-only) Avare app. More recently I bought a Samsung droid smartphone, Avare in that too.
My Samsung tablet is wifi only, no cell service option, but it does have a gps receiver built into it.
I'm not a cyber / IT type guy, I bought the Samsung stuff because it was inexpensive & I figured relatively good quality.
They seem quite a bit more expensive, but is there really an advantage to iphones / ipads?
I'm kinda doubting it when I read that the non-cellular ipad doesn't even incorporate a gps.
I can see if you want to have a tablet / phone / laptop all with compatible operating systems,
but starting from scratch it seems like droid is the way to go-- cheaper and just as good for cavemen like me.
OK, back to the ipad channel.....

hotrod180 wrote:This seems like an ipad-specific discussion, droids need not apply. But...
FWIW I bought a Samsung droid tablet a couple years ago for sectional / moving map GPS use in my airplane.
I use the free (droid-only) Avare app. More recently I bought a Samsung droid smartphone, Avare in that too.
My Samsung tablet is wifi only, no cell service option, but it does have a gps receiver built into it.
I'm not a cyber / IT type guy, I bought the Samsung stuff because it was inexpensive & I figured relatively good quality.
They seem quite a bit more expensive, but is there really an advantage to iphones / ipads?
I'm kinda doubting it when I read that the non-cellular ipad doesn't even incorporate a gps.
I can see if you want to have a tablet / phone / laptop all with compatible operating systems,
but starting from scratch it seems like droid is the way to go-- cheaper and just as good for cavemen like me.
OK, back to the ipad channel.....

I have never owned a Mac product before..have a android phone and always have. Don't see the need to pay the big bucks and have to upgrade every year or 2 like most of the "I-People" do. Lol. That being said, seems like Foreflight is the industry leader and it only works on iOS. That was my reasoning for getting an iPad. It will be my first ever I-Product. I hope they don't let me down. And if it turns out that I end up having to constantly upgrade to newer versions, I will stop using it and find another option. I DO NOT buy $600 electronic devices every year and won't start now...

losbright1 wrote:

hotrod180 wrote:This seems like an ipad-specific discussion, droids need not apply. But...
FWIW I bought a Samsung droid tablet a couple years ago for sectional / moving map GPS use in my airplane.
I use the free (droid-only) Avare app. More recently I bought a Samsung droid smartphone, Avare in that too.
My Samsung tablet is wifi only, no cell service option, but it does have a gps receiver built into it.
I'm not a cyber / IT type guy, I bought the Samsung stuff because it was inexpensive & I figured relatively good quality.
They seem quite a bit more expensive, but is there really an advantage to iphones / ipads?
I'm kinda doubting it when I read that the non-cellular ipad doesn't even incorporate a gps.
I can see if you want to have a tablet / phone / laptop all with compatible operating systems,
but starting from scratch it seems like droid is the way to go-- cheaper and just as good for cavemen like me.
OK, back to the ipad channel.....

I have never owned a Mac product before..have a android phone and always have. Don't see the need to pay the big bucks and have to upgrade every year or 2 like most of the "I-People" do. Lol. That being said, seems like Foreflight is the industry leader and it only works on iOS. That was my reasoning for getting an iPad. It will be my first ever I-Product. I hope they don't let me down. And if it turns out that I end up having to constantly upgrade to newer versions, I will stop using it and find another option. I DO NOT buy $600 electronic devices every year and won't start now...

Well, my first iPad went four years without a glitch. Had to return it to its owner....I retired, and they wouldn’t let me keep it .

So, as soon as I could get to Best Buy, I bought a Mini 4.....which I still have, and that model is still in production. Five years later. Now, Apple offers fairly frequent software updates....free. But they’ve come out with the “Pro” line of iPads, but the mini and standard iPad are still available.

Compare that to a PC running Windows, where new versions of anything require a credit card and hardware is outdated when you buy it.

I’ve never used Apple stuff before, but I’m pretty impressed.

MTV

I similarly eschewed an iAnything until I decided to go EFB vs. paper, and ForeFlight was demo'd to me by a user at OSH one year--I was incredibly impressed. So I got an early Mini, which I still have as a backup to my current Mini 4. Both have cell capability, but I have only a plan for the Mini 4--$10/month through Verizon. I'm already spending just short of $200/month to Verizon anyway, for the family plan and the recent upgraded phone for the SO, so that $10 doesn't seem like much. I have a Brydge keyboard to go with it, so it's effectively a laptop when I'm traveling.

I also switched to an iPhone, because I had a top of the line series of Samsung Androids, which all gave me fits. I'm now on my second iPhone, and that was more because I wanted one with larger capacity than the first one I bought--and they've both been 100% reliable.

FWIW, I tried hotspotting my iPad to my iPhone, and while I can do it, it's really cumbersome. It's worth the extra $10 to be able to just turn the iPad on, make sure its cell service is turned on, and use it. Some say they can always tie to a WiFi somewhere, but I haven't found that very helpful, either--and public WiFi's are notoriously non-secure, whereas cell service is very secure.

So my recommendation is to get a cell equipped iPad of whatever model you decide on. If you don't hook it to a cell plan, you still have a pretty OK GPS to run the EFB's moving map. Incidentally, I've had 2 separate occasions in which my Stratus 2, which has a GPS, had run down because it hadn't automatically shut off like it's supposed to. That meant it wasn't feeding anything, including the GPS, to my iPad. But the iPad still worked flawlessly until the Stratus 2 charged enough to come on line, where it took over providing all of its information to my iPad.

Cary