I disagree
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| r_a_trip Jun 20, 2012 4:56 AM EDT |
From a futurist's point of view, the Surface is undoubtedly a horrid "Frankensteinian" contraption. However, the touch paradigm is in its infancy and today it is very ill suited for information creation and manipulation. When it comes to information consumption a touch tablet is hard to beat in ease of use. A few weeks ago, while we were visiting my boyfriend's family on Aruba, I was unpleasantly confronted with the shortcomings of the current form of touch tablets. The SD card (32GB) of our digital camera malfunctioned and I suddenly had to perform a rescue operation to save our pictures. Armed with our Acer Iconia 500, running Android 4.04, I mounted the SD card and tried to copy over some 900+ pictures. Besides the fact that the Android file managers are extremely cumbersome to use, Android absolutely choked on the amount of data. Since there was some corruption in the file allocation table, I tried to find an "app" that could recover that kind of problem. What was available can only be described as toys. After utterly failing to rescue our pictures using Android, I cursed myself for taking the tablet with us, instead of the netbook running Linux Mint. I ended up saving our pictures on the family PC running Windows 7. I had to buy a fairly expensive Windows program for it too, but at that moment I cared more for our pictures than the fact that that program would see very limited use after the recovery (doesn't run on Linux). Had I brought the netbook, I would have had a fully mature environment with all options for recovery available. For now, these post-PC devices are immature and only suited for information consumption and very limited information manipulation. I can't blame MS for trying to meld their mature environment with the young, new paradigm. People are used to the powerful options of Windows. If MS came with a pure tablet OS (made to current iOS and Android standards), they would be lambasted for having produced a useless toy. Maybe some technological luminaries will come up with wholly new ways of interaction for touch based devices and maybe in the future, these devices will be as powerful or more powerful than the traditional PC. Right now, that Acer Iconia will be banned to the coffee table to serve as the fun, leisure time toy that it is. For the foreseeable future, I'll be using a traditional WIMP device to do my serious stuff. P.S. Maybe my experience would have differed with a Vivaldi tablet... |
| JaseP Jun 20, 2012 12:24 PM EDT |
I agree somewhat,... Moving large, or many, files in Android can only be described as a royal pain in the dorsal nether regions. But remember, the devices are not designed to be full featured computers. The problem with M$ is that they are always on the wrong tack. They're terribly out of step with people. The only really cool thing about these latest offerings are this keyboard/cover things... Otherwise, ... zero innovation. But you could have bought a $20 USB stick, and downloaded the gparted live distro onto the stick,... That's the problem M$,... and partially why it is so beloved by IT people,... the tools to fix anything are expensive and keeps the IT tech support people in business... So I disagree that they have a "mature" platform,... just an overworked/overdesigned one... By the way, does your A500 ever suffer from the "sleep of death" problem? Mine just started with that,... and I have only seen a couple of solutions,... one to download an app called "Wake my Android Pro" and another to do two hard resets (reset switch near the USB port) in a row,... Otherwise send it to Acer for a warranty fix, only to have them do absolutely nothing. |
| r_a_trip Jun 20, 2012 2:18 PM EDT |
By the way, does your A500 ever suffer from the "sleep of death" problem? It has, but I solved it with an unlocked ICS bootloader from http://www.tegraowners.com/ Just search the forums if you are comfortable with community android efforts. It means bye bye Honeycomb though. |
| JaseP Jun 20, 2012 6:00 PM EDT |
I'm using the ICS official Acer upgrade... Not rooted... Will it work with that, or only the Cyanigan (sp?) Mod one? |
| r_a_trip Jun 21, 2012 3:09 AM EDT |
AFAIK (modding carries inherent risk), the bootloader only needs an ICS ROM. It should not matter if it is a stock ROM or a custom one. BlackThund3r's APX tool is a fairly convenient way of flashing the bootloader. http://forum.tegraowners.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=388. How is Acer's "stock" ICS ROM? Are they closely following Google or have they Acer-ified it? |
| JaseP Jun 21, 2012 9:31 AM EDT |
They've only Acer-ified it a little,... But unlike some of the Hacker ROMs, all devices work,... The major things that are different are the change desktop screen by tapping the edge thing (actually pretty nice) and the bloat-ware. I have no desire to switch to a non-stock ROM, and might only root if I feel I need it in the future. Nice to know a stock ICS will work,... but I'm a little concerned that it might break OTA updates. |
| r_a_trip Jun 22, 2012 2:39 AM EDT |
Breaking OTA is a concern. If that is a must have feature, the only option is to to wait for Acer to fix the SoD issue. OTOH, the Acer stock ROM's are also on xda-developers. So manual updating is always possible. |
| JaseP Jun 22, 2012 1:16 PM EDT |
After doing a reset button reset, 2 times in a row,... the machine doesn't seem to be troubled by it any longer... I'm guessing it's a memory leak (or something) in one of the binary blobs served up to the wireless chipset. People tend to think that wireless synching while sleeping is involved. |
| helios Jun 23, 2012 9:48 AM EDT |
People tend to think that wireless synching while sleeping is involved. Sounds suspiciously like a problem that presented itself way back in the .27 kernel with several broadcom chips..... |
| JaseP Jun 23, 2012 7:57 PM EDT |
Maybe it's a reversion bug?!?! |
| dinotrac Jun 25, 2012 5:29 AM EDT |
Pretty d@mned stupid article. I love my tablet, I really do. It is far more useful than I would have imagined, but... That's because I have an Asus Transformer, which docks into -- amazement! -- a keyboard. Serious typing doesn't work on software keyboards. I'm sure they're great for incompetent typists, but who wants to be slowed to the crawl they demand? And -- author's silly assumption that keyboards and touch are mutually exclusive has no bearing on reality. When I have the keyboard attached, I use it. And I touch, swipe, pinch as well. You do what makes sense. Has kind of ruined me for my trusty old netbook, though. It does things that my tablet can't, but I keep poking at the screen... |
| JaseP Jun 25, 2012 11:19 AM EDT |
My Dell Inspiron Duo does both... And I learned last night that my Acer A500 works just fine with a flexible (latex rubber) USB keyboard I have ... But I agree with Dino,... touch &keyboards are not mutually exclusive. |
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