Category: Toys & Tech

One Tablet PC Per Child Tablet PC aka “iPad10”

I got to test out a number of Tablet PCs at one of the education projects I’m helping out. My opinion is that they are complete crap and even worse than I expected at the 81 USD price mark, for several reasons:

  • Of 6 units I tested, 2 were obviously defective (one would not charge past 12% and one constantly emitted a high-pitch squeal)
  • Overall build quality is poor
  • Devices show deep scratches, bubbles under the protective film, and other physical damage as delivered
  • Most of the cases I saw (I only checked a dozen or so out of 40 units delivered) were black or white, with some hot pink thrown in. This is a horrible thing for distributing to a group of kids.
  • Battery life is the worst I’ve ever heard of for any tablet PC – under 30 minutes of normal use
  • The touch screen is unresponsive and frustrating (removing the protective film made it a bit better, but resulted in really bad smudging)
  • Even though the battery capacity is so limited, charging time from near empty is around 80 minutes
  • Even the power adapters are crap; they get very hot and the cords are too short
  • This tablet is the second slowest I’ve ever used – the first being a very similar Chinese unit I tested two years ago
  • This tablet features perhaps the only graphical user interface I’ve ever used that doesn’t support drag and drop
  • The Android OS loads so slow, it has time to show off 3 boot screens/loading sequences

On the positive side:

  • The accessories for the tablets are good. The case, USB keyboard, and USB/ethernet dongle work just fine.
  • The product markings make for a fine conversation piece (iPad5, iPad6, iPad10, 4G, 64GB)

 

Software info:

Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio aren’t available in Asia…

…so hey, fuck you and your stupid attempts to listen to music legally. On the other hand, BitTorrent works quite well, so hey, fuck you, too. The music industry (as we know it), the movie industry, and copyright in general will be dragged into a completely new system, no doubt kicking and screaming, but hopefully within our lifetimes. Anything less would be a massive failure on our part, tantamount to the way we were handed down reefer madness and the war on drugs.

I accidentally deleted all of my Gmail contacts with my Android phone…

…but this is why I use Gmail instead of, say, Hmail or Ymail. I restored all 1,000+ of my contacts by logging into Gmail on a PC and doing the following:

  1. Click Contacts.
  2. From the More actions drop-down menu, choose Restore contacts.
  3. Choose the time you’d like to revert your contacts list to (e.g. 10 minutes ago, one hour ago, one week ago, etc). We suggest that you also make a note of the time that you restore your contacts, in case you’d like to return to where you started.
  4. Click Restore. You’ll see a confirmation at the top of the screen when the rollback is complete.

You can perform a restore from up to 30 days ago.

This info plus more can be found on the relevant Google support page.

USB 3.0 in full matzofrackin effect!

We’re leaving for the US tomorrow night, so I’m preparing a full data backup of our most important work plus digital photos that now number in the hundreds of thousands and date back 14 years or so. It all adds up to less than a terabyte because I store the big files like RAW format photos and midget elephant tentacle pr0n elsewhere. So the backup method I started from our last trip back home is to copy everything to an external HD and store it at our home in the states – it’s a pretty ideal offsite storage solution.

I went to buy a 2.5″ USB hard drive at the computer store and found that last year’s flood has driven the price on HDs up at least 20% even here in Thailand. The one major difference in spec on external HDs from two years ago is that most of them feature USB 3 now. Eager to see if it really makes a difference or not, I got home and promptly dumped my photo archives on it… It really is super fast! It feels like the transfer speed is limited by the speed of the drive now instead of bottlenecking at the controller. The transfer rate holds steady over 40 MB/second and peaks at over 50, which is a hell of a lot faster than I remember the USB 2 drives being.

Screenshots with HTC Desire HD

My Desire HD, which is running original (non-rooted) Orange system software, was recently updated to Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) and HTC Sense 3.0. Along with all the UI improvements and improved battery performance came a very cool feature: The ability to capture screens built into the system.

To capture a screen (take a screenshot) with an updated Desire HD, hold down the power button while pressing the Home key. By default, the phone will make a camera shutter sound to let you know it captured the screen.

This same procedure will work on some other updated (Android 2.3.5, HTC Sense 3) HTC phones, and apparently on Apple iPhones as well (which they will teach you FOR FREE at your local Genius bar!).

New Google TOS & Privacy Policy

Quite a few people have asked what I think of the new, unified Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. The short answer is that it’s nothing to worry about.

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If you are smart, you use Gmail above all other free email services because it works the best. You probably use a bunch of other Google services as well. However, Google is a successful corporation that does not place your interests above their company interests. It is entirely conceivable that they may screw you some time, in some way. Until it happens, just enjoy the amazing shit they provide to you at no charge.

Besides, Facebook is already screwing you much harder than Google could even dream of.