For the OP - I suggest you stick to a known brand name for your tablet, and as others have said, you should have good choices in this price range. There are a lot of knock-offs in the market of dubious quality, spend your money wisely. mike, You're not alone, the world is full of Apple fanboys. For good reason. No company comes close to Apple in making technology cool and easy to use. They do it over and over again with product after product. One compromise that results is that their products and software are inflexible. They decide that a given function or piece of software needs to work in one particular way, and that's that. No alternatives, no choices. If their predetermined approach doesn't suit you, too bad. I don't putter or play with the stuff that I have, but the inflexibility drives me nuts. We've had various Apple products in the house over the years. The quality has been no better on average than other stuff, so it's not like the premium prices are because of premium value. Maybe my experiences have been unrepresentative, but I personally do prefer non-Apple products. I know that puts me into a minority group.

cathrugg--my DH is in IT as well. He helped to some degree with set-up, but not all that much. Not only doesn't/hasn't he used Apple devices, he has been super, super busy lately, so I've been figuring out a lot of this on my own (some trial and error, some via internet queries and searches). I might have email set to manual already, have to check. My Push notifications might be on though, so that might override the ability to set email settings? Brightness set to auto, I believe (automatically dims in lower light situations). Have to check maps setting. I have iPad locator "on", but I think my other locator settings are off. Running down the battery, and then fully charging it (leaving it on the charger an add'l 20-30 min past reaching 100%), helped a great deal. Now if it's 100% when I go to bed, it's either still 100% when I get up, or it's only down 1% or 2%. It also stopped dropping by 10% or more by the afternoon when it's sitting unused all day. Made a big difference. I'll take a look at the things you mentioned and report back! I really am enjoying mine. Would love to have the 4G of the newly unveiled iPad (I'm spoiled with the speed of our home Wi-Fi, so using my iPad on 3G when I have to, does seem a little slow to me at times). When I get a 4G phone and use that as my "hot spot" though, it shouldn't really matter. Not sure how much diff the A5X chip/quad core processor will make vs the A5 chip in the iPad 2, though the demo at the big unveiling yesterday supposedly showed a big diff in speed. Would love to compare the screen resolutions (iPad 2 vs new iPad) side-by-side, to see how visible the difference really is to my eyes. Would not be happy with the increase in weight and thickness, so all in all, I don't feel too bad about getting an iPad 2 instead of waiting for the new one. Mine's 32 GB, which won't be available in the iPad 2 with the release of the new one, so I guess mine will be a collector's item soon! LOL

I went through this while selecting my own Apple tablet. I do not know much about other tablets, I heard some are very good and their prices are very competitive. Some have many features than what I need. I picked IPad to go with the iPhone and Mac I have. I also have an iPhone from work, it makes life easier because I can easily sych and transfer data among devices. I chose IPad Air due to its display size and quality. I want to have bigger viewing area for more complex diagrams, charts and photos. Also, it is easier on my eyes and for trips. My daughter loves her mini which has higher display resolution produces a little sharper images. For myself, a phone of 16GB is sufficient, but for a tablet, 16 GB is a little limited, because applications take memory space, so the actual data storage is much less than 16 GB. I knew I would add more applications when I am more comfortable with a tablet. I want plenty room to store data, photos, books, music, movies and charts. We could store things on Cloud, but the storage size allocated is limited, it charges extra for more room. I finally settled on an IPad Air with 64 GB for future growth, but for a regular user, 32 GB should be plenty. I am very happy with my iPad Air, I use it to read, play and work every day. No, I don't think we could make phone call with an IPad as using a regular cell phone. May be can call through Skype, but I have not tried it yet. The celluar feature allows data transfer everywhere, the wi-fi feature only allows receiving data at the location a wi-fi system is available. You really should try a smart phone. I love Iphone, its user interface is so sleek, intuitive and convenient. You can take a crash course at an Apple store or a cell service provider such as Verizon. We think smart phone is complicate only because we have been 'brain washed" by conventional user interface on a regular cell phone, you would appreciate it once you learned smart phone interface. Hope this helps.

We've have had our Samsung 4 drawer fridge for 6 years. The only problem that we've had was using a cheaper water filter which was resolved in replacing the water filter carriage, which is no small feat in it self. The middle drawer we keep drinks, coffee and meds. The freezer compartment has 3 divisions and a drawer and a small shelf which is in the front, it serves us well. Note: we also have a chest freezer elsewhere.