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Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

arstechnica.com

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Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#41

Post by lukeschlather »

blhack wrote: post #37
mike-cardwell wrote: post #17

I'd be tempted to use one of these as a device which simply displays a custom written webpage which fetches and displays information. Once you've got it running it does nothing other than display a webpage. Put it on the desk, plugged in constantly. It could show my calendar or weather/traffic data.

What's a small LCD panel cost instead?

Generally more. And they don't come with integrated WiFi or enough CPU to display anything on their own.

I'm trying to figure out if one of these would be useful as a wireless display for data that updates once every 5 minutes or so.

I live at a retreat center in the Cascade mountains, and we've got all sorts of diagnostic data about our hydroelectric generator and furnaces that would be useful to show.

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#42

Post by spiffworks »

mikeryan wrote: post #28

When people talk about the problems of Android fragmentation, its this low end where things get really scary.

It is also at the low end that things get interesting. Most people get caught up in this fight over Android and iOS, so they never see that they are completely divergent platforms. Android will achieve ubiquity over the next few years. Toasters to phones to tablets to GPS units to military handhelds will all run it. The only thing that has been holding back such ubiquity so far has been Google's refusal to license the Market to devices which do not contain a "phone". If and when that changes, things will start to heat up. We already have decent $130 handsets running 2.2. How long do you think before Android is the new Symbian, with people buying "dumbphones" with Android without realising they've got it? Fragmentation be damned, it is a by-product of ubiquity.

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#43

Post by spiffworks »

elblanco wrote: post #15
Splines wrote: post #10

I learned about the Nook Color over the weekend. It has the potential to be a really good Android tablet ($249, 800MHz A8, 8GB storage). Only thing is that it's restricted to running apps approved by B&N, and it's running 2.1.

I wonder how long till it's rooted?

Not long at all, hopefully.

http://fineoils.blogspot.com/2010/11/nook-colour-root-is-nea...

They got it to boot from an sd card, which is a step in the right direction. When it gets rooted, it will be one hell of a tablet for its price. Is this a loss leader for B&N? It seems very cheap for its build quality.

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#44

Post by motters »

frb wrote: post #30
nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #2

I pity all the uninformed consumers who buy this, or even worse, people who receive this as a gift from those uninformed consumers...

Devices like these can be very harmful to Android's image in the public, especially if their only feature/selling point is "powered by Android". My brother bought a Samsung Galaxy cellphone ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy ). The half-baked combination of hardware and software, with no updates available, made him soon regret the purchase. He was angry at Samsung and Google/Android for "producing such cra…

Right, and tablets generally. If a lot of ordinary users buy these or receive them as Christmas presents they may just conclude that tablets and/or Android are worthless and should be avoided in any future purchases.

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#45

Post by dpcan »

aberkowitz wrote: post #16

If Google were smart, they'd come out with their own Android tablet. That way people would stop being enticed by this absolute crap.

Nexus One? It's a larger screen than most devices, but still not a "tablet" I guess. Maybe this was their test run.

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#47

Post by gcb »

There are crap copy-cats from china all over the place. go to dealextreme and you will find 200 models of windows mobile tablets!

i have one to run GPS in my car. cost me $50 and has a 7in screen! works perfectly... for the price.

but the first ones where just crappy. unusable. slow. battery was as good as that one. look for some old reviews.

With that one it will be the same.

As soon as there is real competition in the android tablet/netbook market the chinese copy-cats will start to show up some really good products.

mark this: android will only be a HUGE hit when those devices that does not goes out of their way to prevent hacking start to hit the market. and it is starting

The little android momentum had so far was a mistake on the part of manufacturers. they by accident let android be hackable. and are fixing it, for android loss.

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#48

Post by stcredzero »

motters wrote: post #44
frb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devices like these can be very harmful to Android's image in the public, especially if their only feature/selling point is "powered by Android". My brother bought a Samsung Galaxy cellphone ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy ). The half-baked combination of hardware and software, with no updates available, made him soon regret the purchase. He was angry at Samsung and Google/Android for "producing such cra…

Right, and tablets generally. If a lot of ordinary users buy these or receive them as Christmas presents they may just conclude that tablets and/or Android are worthless and should be avoided in any future purchases.

More likely, they'll think, "I should've gotten an iPad!"

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#50

Post by wtallis »

trotsky wrote: post #35
watty wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, Ars Technica is one of the least biased tech blogs I've found. If anything they're biased against Apple. Like it or not the products sucks and runs Android.

ars? biased against apple? surely you troll.

Ars Technica's most notable Apple reporter, John Siracusa, still holds a grudge against Apple for nearly every way in which Mac OS X went with a NeXT-style user interface over a Classic Mac OS UI paradigm.

They do a good job of producing informative articles, but you have to watch out for anything subjective, because a lot of it is quite unreasonable, and it's quite common for their conclusions about an Apple product to be invalid and useless for anyone living in the real world. The apparent bias in any given article can be all over the map, but on average, they seem to slightly prefer being unfair to Apple.

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