Barry Dahl dot com

1. Several ports – including two USB and one SD card reader.
2. VGA connector is now available for about $30-40. I bought one and it works.
3. Keyboard is generally good to have. It doubles as a protective case and greatly extends battery life (see below).
4. Asus is fairly aggressive about pushing out Android updates – which is usually a good thing (or not, see below).
5. Great for playing some games (Kill eight pigs with one bird?).
6. Works great for simple tasks – such as checking email or catching up on Twitter via Tweetdeck or Tweetcaster.
7. The screen resolution seems very good. Great picture when streaming Netflix or Hulu, watching YouTube HD videos, and playing games with high-quality graphics.
8. My kids think it’s very cool (they’re kids, nuff said).
9. Connections to known wifi networks are quick and successful.
10. It must have a magnetic field, because everybody is attracted to it and wants to ask me about it. (This could easily go on the bottom list.)

But there’s also some not-so-good things (okay, a lot of them):

1. Very tinny external speakers – you must use headphones or auxiliary speakers for music or any other audio.
2. The cameras are pretty crappy. The front-facing camera is 1.2 MP and I rarely use it. The 5MP auto-focus rear-facing camera is completely under-whelming. Especially indoors, the photos are grainy and of extremely low quality. In very well-lit (outdoors) settings you’ll get somewhat better photos, but they have little detail, little contrast, and just an overall muddy feel to them.  Most pics are downright ugly.
3. The keyboard is kind of wonky – especially the touch pad – while typing, the cursor is constantly jumping to other parts of the page – I guess that’s because my wrist or palm brushes against the touch pad (even when I don’t feel it).
4. The metal covering of both the ePad and the dock is very slippery and hard to hold on to. It “looks” like it would be a great “grippy” surface – but those looks are deceiving.
5. Not all Android updates are great – including the much-awaited 4.0 ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), which seems very buggy, causing the Transformer to reboot a few times a day for no apparent reason. BTW, almost all Transformer user are ticked about this – see the Forum posts here.
6. I very much dislike how the open application closes when the tablet is undocked from the keyboard. Seems to happen with all the apps. Kicks you out of the app and takes you back to the home screen. (Update: this seems to have stopped – maybe that is one improvement with ICS.)
7. The boot time is less than impressive; about 40-50 seconds from a cold start.
8. You need to boot from a cold start unless you are a very frequent user as well as a frequent charger. Even though it touts 12-15 hours of battery life (with the keyboard dock), that seems to include “sleep time” (push the power button to darken the screen and close the top), when you think that it should be conserving battery power. If you leave it in this sleep state for a while (presumably 12 hours or more), you can expect a totally dead device when you are ready to use it again. This seems like a bug, not a feature. Some people are reporting that this battery drain only started for them after they installed Android ICS (late Feb. 2012) – but it has always been that way for me.
   
9. The browsers are crippled. Firefox on the tablet is a very poor tool. Even the native browser, which is similar to Google Chrome on a PC, is not very full featured. As if the weak browsers aren’t bad enough, many sites are apparently coded to kick you into their mobile version even though the  screen is large enough for full versions. Most of the time I hate this.
10. For the life of me, I can’t get the flash player to install properly – and I’ve tried about 20 times. Flash is one of the main reasons I chose an Android tablet over the iSpaz. I need to research this because there is probably a work-around – but I’m expecting it to “just work!” NOTE: YouTube videos do play with the free YouTube app, but most sites that use flash simply do not work in any of my four browsers.
11. Incredibly short power cord. Heck, the cord for my cell phone is twice as long.
12. Some combination of wonky browsers and possibly the flash player recently caused me a great deal of angst. Trying to access a particular app on Facebook proved to be impossible, even though I tried with four different browsers (2 of which just constantly crashed – Opera Mini  and Dolphin browser), and at least 15 times. On my laptop, this was a seven second operation. Not sure who to blame it on, but overall I was not a happy user.

This post tells me that I can expect ASUS to have a fix in place for all the Ice Cream Sandwich issues next week. (Update: I believe this was installed yesterday, and will report back if things are significantly different.)

Overall, I do prefer the Transformer to the iPud – for various reasons. But, as you can probably tell, I’m not very enamored with either of them. My HP TouchSmart convertible tablet (a full powered PC, with touch screen, stylus, Win7, and superior ease-of-use) is about ten times better, albeit considerably more expensive as well. YMMV.

Filed under: Computing | Comments Off on Me and My Transformer – NBD

In case you missed it in the news last year, I was an unhappy iPad owner. Bought version 1 and found it to be just an expensive toy with very few features and incredibly overpriced. But that’s just me. Clearly.

I found some sucker to take it off my hands (thanks Witt), and continued on just fine with life after the iSpaz. During that same time frame I was loving my Droid phone – and have found the Android OS to be what I want it to be – which really just means that I’m not tied to Apple and the much-hated (by me) iTunes.

So I’ve been keeping my eye on the many different Android-based tablets that have been coming out. I was taken by the Toshiba, interested in the IBM, and amazed by the ASUS (Flickr-CC photo at left by blogeee.net).

I figured that amazement was better than being taken or just interested – so I got transformed by the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Here’s a little collage that shows my delight in getting it ready for use. Click on the graphic below to enlarge it.

So what’s to like? How about:

• Screen: The Asus is larger (10.1 vs. 9.7) with more pixels (1280X800 vs. 1024X768)
• Design: The Eee Pad has a far less slippery backside
• Cameras: Both front-facing and back-facing cameras on EeePad have more megapixels than iPad2
• Storage capacity: i bought the 16GB version, but it has a microSD slot that can hold another 32 GB – so the iPad loses on that front as well
• Battery life: with the optional keyboard/case, the Asus can give you 16 hours of unconnected usage. Comparing just the tablets themselves, the iPad2 eeks out a small win here
• Apps: I was surprised to find that it automatically installed all the apps that I have on my Droid. That was a great time-saver for me because I would want most of them on the tablet as well.
• Freedom: I still have no need to reinstall iTunes (ever again)
• One word: Flash

What are my first-day beefs with the EeePad?

• The built-in speakers sound terrible. haven’t hooked up my ear buds yet, but they have to sound better (I hope)
• The Eee Pad weighs an extra 2.5 ounces – which is sure to cause me severe back pain
• Okay – who decided that Eee Pad was a good name? Eeeeeeeekkkkk

Filed under: Computing | 3 Comments »

The new Netflix pricing plan is really absurd. I had a membership several years ago and didn’t really use it all that much. The family decided that we wanted to go with the streaming service and so we jumped back on the flixwagon about two months ago. During the first month, my family streamed 47 movies/shows. During the second month, our intake fell to only 29 movies/shows via streaming. Since the family spends most of the summer time at the cottage, we paid the extra $2 during the past month to have 1 DVD at a time to watch out there. We’ve watched 8 DVDs in that first month of mail service.

To recap. $8 in month one for 47 movies. $10 in month two for 37 movies.

Now they would like to start charging us $16 for those 37 movies that we watched this past month. Clearly, we need to find a different service where we can get our money’s worth.  < /sarcasm>

Filed under: Computing | Comments Off on Netflix Pricing – Oh, the Humanity