[tssg-tech] Re: Android tablet for $70 at woot.com...
- From: Emad-ud-deen Leiman <emadleiman47@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: tssg-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:56:18 -0500
Hi,
Beware, it's refurbished.
Here is a review from Amazon:
Pro:
- Capacitive touch screen. Sounds nice... it is nice when it works (see Cons).
- Sturdy construction
- Android 2.2 (though official upgrade from Velocity Micro)
- VERY long battery life. Excellent!
Cons:
- Capacitive touch screen is very slow. Often it goes in power sleep (the
controller of the touch screen), so when you touch it it doesn't detect your
touch. You have to click twice... (or more). The multi-touch feature is
completely useless because of the speed. For example, you pinch in to zoom, and
the result shows up after 2-3 seconds (or even more). Any button need to be
pressed more than once, and sometimes you don't know if it took the click or
not.
- Internally it uses a MIPS CPU. Although there's nothing bad with it, it uses
a different instruction set of the most popular ARM-based CPUs.
- Mediocre screen quality. Forget brilliant colors, even at maximum brightness
- The Home, Back, and Menu buttons are completely invisible, and they light up
only when you push it. Unfortunately your fingers are NOT transparent, so you
don't see them even when you push them. They are always difficult to find. Very
bad design.
- Slow. Slow SLOW!. To render a full page takes forever. Associate this with
the slow response of the touch screen and makes this product useless.
- Can play nice video but up to 900 Kbps. I tried encoding video at around
1Mbps but it won't play.
- Not stable. The stock firmware (Android 2.0) has many limitations, The
Velocity Micro has an update for Android 2.2, but the new firmware have some
serious issue. It crashes once in a while. If you play a movie with some
problems, it crash your system (keep a pin clip handy all the time for the
RESET button).
- Software. The default app store (not the google one) is quite bad, with ugly
and useless apps. Amazon appstore doesn't work (fails to install all the apps).
The google app store requires rooting the device, but because of the MIPS
issue, the popular rooting packages won't work. After some time the device also
start giving me "No more space" error, but there is plenty of room in the
internal flash... it must be something wrong with the OS. Now I cannot install
anything anymore...
- No Netflix (see MIPS issue)
Conclusion:
- Good for: watching a movie on the go (encode it yourself), you'll appreciate
the long battery life
- Listen to music (if you manage to install something)
I think most of you saw my 7" tablet. It's also capacitive but it's fast and
reliable. I also sell these a new tablets and the firmware is upgradable.
Truly,
Emad
On 16 Nov 2011, at 06:48, Jim Peters wrote:
> All,
>
> Just saw that today's offering at woot.com is a refurbished Android 2.2
> tablet. You might want to read the community forum to see what they think
> of it.
>
> The new job is going well. I'm working in downtown Worcester -- that's a
> different experience at a company called Dovetail Internet Technologies.
> My position there is Hosting Support Technician. I'm basically supporting
> DNS, SSL Certificates and doing IT and operations.
>
> Jim.
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