So I bought an android tablet
What can I say? Father's day tradition of annoying the wife and spending continued for one more year.
I picked up an ASUS eeePad Transformer 32GB Wireless model and I'm loving it. It shipped with Android 3.0 Honeycomb as standard, but after switching it on and connecting to WIFI, it detected an update which it proceeded to download in the background without any prompting.
While this was happening I decided to research how to Root the thing and naturally turned to XDA Developers. I found that the rooting required a (micro) sd card to perform which went relatively smoothly. I then installed the Prime Custom ROM also from XDA Developers.
The Prime ROM has all the ASUS OEM Apps installed and appears to be largely identical, but of course has additional capabilities due to it being rooted. My main reason for rooting any android device is to run the CIFS filesystem in the kernel, which allows me to mount Windows (or Linux / OSX) shares on the sdcard. What that means is that I have access to my network shares as folders on the device. I've been doing this for years on my various Android phones and it works the same way on the tablet.
So effectively my tablet has all my music, videos & photos without using any disk space. Everything is in my (local) cloud. This is just so convenient I can't even begin to explain what a killer feature this is. This feature forms the foundation of how I use the device to access movies, ebooks, music, comics, documents, downloads, etc. So many other activities depend on this feature working. It's a massive time saver as I don't have to copy files over wifi to the device. Currently, I am using this one way, in that I don't sync data back to the pc, but as of now, I don't really need to do that.
At any rate, I've installed a batch of games & apps and over the coming weeks, will post some more info about specific use cases.
Bottom line. Its similarly priced to an equivalent ipad 2 here and for some people, I would recommend the Apple unit over the ASUS one. However, for my needs, I decided against the iPad2. One of my use cases for the devices is obviously to consume ebooks of all kinds. I have tested reading comics on the iPad and find that the screen resolution is too low to read the comics in full screen. I have to zoom into the page and scroll around to read comfortably. I am aware that this is also due to my own eye-sight capabilities, but thats the reality. The Transformer's screen res of 1280x720 allows me to read comics at the default full page view. I have read about 10 comics so far without any major squinting required. I am using an app called Perfect Viewer which is the model of subtle interface. The screen is divided into zones and touching those zones activate a function. No menu's or overlays, just clean next / prev page, next / prev book, etc.
I plan to download digital versions of the comics I own to read them this way. My watchmen comic is a bit hard on my eyes and I am hoping the digital version will be an easier read.
More posts to follow.
I would rate this tablet an 8/10 overall. For interests sake, I would probably rate the iPad 2 the same or even 8.5. There really is very little wrong with the ipad 2 technically. Its just not for me. The eeePad is my first Android tablet and hopefully not the last!
I picked up an ASUS eeePad Transformer 32GB Wireless model and I'm loving it. It shipped with Android 3.0 Honeycomb as standard, but after switching it on and connecting to WIFI, it detected an update which it proceeded to download in the background without any prompting.
While this was happening I decided to research how to Root the thing and naturally turned to XDA Developers. I found that the rooting required a (micro) sd card to perform which went relatively smoothly. I then installed the Prime Custom ROM also from XDA Developers.
The Prime ROM has all the ASUS OEM Apps installed and appears to be largely identical, but of course has additional capabilities due to it being rooted. My main reason for rooting any android device is to run the CIFS filesystem in the kernel, which allows me to mount Windows (or Linux / OSX) shares on the sdcard. What that means is that I have access to my network shares as folders on the device. I've been doing this for years on my various Android phones and it works the same way on the tablet.
So effectively my tablet has all my music, videos & photos without using any disk space. Everything is in my (local) cloud. This is just so convenient I can't even begin to explain what a killer feature this is. This feature forms the foundation of how I use the device to access movies, ebooks, music, comics, documents, downloads, etc. So many other activities depend on this feature working. It's a massive time saver as I don't have to copy files over wifi to the device. Currently, I am using this one way, in that I don't sync data back to the pc, but as of now, I don't really need to do that.
At any rate, I've installed a batch of games & apps and over the coming weeks, will post some more info about specific use cases.
Bottom line. Its similarly priced to an equivalent ipad 2 here and for some people, I would recommend the Apple unit over the ASUS one. However, for my needs, I decided against the iPad2. One of my use cases for the devices is obviously to consume ebooks of all kinds. I have tested reading comics on the iPad and find that the screen resolution is too low to read the comics in full screen. I have to zoom into the page and scroll around to read comfortably. I am aware that this is also due to my own eye-sight capabilities, but thats the reality. The Transformer's screen res of 1280x720 allows me to read comics at the default full page view. I have read about 10 comics so far without any major squinting required. I am using an app called Perfect Viewer which is the model of subtle interface. The screen is divided into zones and touching those zones activate a function. No menu's or overlays, just clean next / prev page, next / prev book, etc.
I plan to download digital versions of the comics I own to read them this way. My watchmen comic is a bit hard on my eyes and I am hoping the digital version will be an easier read.
More posts to follow.
I would rate this tablet an 8/10 overall. For interests sake, I would probably rate the iPad 2 the same or even 8.5. There really is very little wrong with the ipad 2 technically. Its just not for me. The eeePad is my first Android tablet and hopefully not the last!
Comments