I am loving the way the future of android is looking. The great thing is that you have a choice of what you want the hardware to be, and you still have the same huge selection of apps to choose from. You also get a device that's pretty good at web browsing, including flash.
So, a couple of weeks ago I picked up that 10.1 inch viewsonic gtablet. The specs on it were amazing. Tegra chipset, which is a dual core processor ( although android can't use 2 cpus yet) with n3d acceleration, big glossy screen, lots of memory. But it has some fatal flaws. First, the stock ui is horrible. That's not too big of a problem since the folks in #tegratab on freenode have a totally revamped firmware that fixes it up. To me, the biggest problem with it is the super glossy screen. You really can't see anything unless you look at it directly head-on. Add to that every touch on the screen leaves a big smudge that further distorts the view. If you use it for any period of time you have to constantly wipe it to keep being able to see. I also decided that the 10 inch size is too large. I wanted something I could read on, but that was just too cumbersome. It is the same size as an ipad, so I assume I would feel the same way about that. So, I took that back to the store and bought a barnes and noble nook color. It is a 7 inch tablet, same size as the samsung galaxy, but only $250. It is missing some things that other tabs have: 3g, camera, gps; but since I already have an android phone, I can tether to that for those things. I also had to root it to get access to the Market, Google apps, and a regular launcher ( see www.nookdevs.com for instructions). The screen on this thing, in my opinion, is perfect. Smudges don't show up on it during use, it is perfectly viewable at any angle, and since it is a smaller screen running at the same resolution as the viewsonic (1024*600), the pixel density makes text and images look realky great. The smaller form factor does not take away from the usable real estate since it is the same resolution as a bigger tablet. It is also very easy to type on. I am typing this entire email on it in portrait mode with my thumbs. The other big thing that the nook has going for it is the huge customer base, which to me means it's going to have a long support time, and it already has a ton of accessories. B&N has opened up an sdk for it and released source as well. On Dec 20, 2010 7:06 PM, "Brad Bendily" <[email protected]> wrote: Well. I already have an iPhone. So I don't really want the maxipad version of the same limited thing. Plus I really wanted to play around with android. I read last week that the viewsonic tabs were being pulled from some shelves. But I don't know any details beyond that. What got me started is that there are a few $100-$200 models. So i was considering one of them. But if I buy something I don't want to buy a piece of crap. So I might wait and see what comes out from ces. On Dec 20, 2010, at 4:48 PM, Jordan Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > well... i think most... _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
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