Thursday, March 21, 2013

A new toy (or hello world)

I had a Kindle Fire. My brother gave it to me. It has served me faithfully, but from the point of view of a tablet, it sucks. It does kindle ebooks pretty well, and you can Netflix on it, too. But beyond that, you're going to have issues.  So I was was at the Wally World website last week too buy socks and underwear, said I ended up buying a Samsung Galaxy Tab II 7.0. What can I say? It has Jellybean (the Kindle has Gingerbread), 2 cameras, GPS, and a slot for a memory card. And it has the Google Play store on it (I had to root the kindle to get that installed), as well as the Amazon appstore & kindle app (and I didn't need to root it to get them installed either).

Rooting it was very difficult, but I got it rooted somehow. I'm right now not interested in running a custom rom on this device (which is good, as I could never get a recovery installed). Unlike all the other android devices I used, the /data directory is sized dynamically, so I can use the full 4 gB to install my apps without having to use a 2nd partition on my memory card (which I do for my phone). The email client is the same as my phone (in fact I like the email on the tablet better than the phone because of the bigger screen size...). Netflix is a piece of cake (I was watching little bit of Star Trek last night).

App-wise, it runs more apps than the kindle fire. If I have any regrets about the galaxy, it's that the paid apps that I bought for my kindle aren't compatible with this. But then again, I've more apps available from both Google Play and the Amazon Appstore, so there's a lot more versatility.

All in all, I heartily endorse this product. Please go out and buy this. And unlike the iPad mini, you can still keep your man card while using this...

Edit: good tech doesn't need to go waste. My kindle fire will find a new home with my father ...