my Digix tablet

On Black Saturday (the day after Black Friday), I set out to buy an iPad.

But first I stopped at Radio Shack on the way because I remembered they had a 10" tablet on sale for $150.    It was the Digix 10" tablet.  They didn't have it in stock, but said they could order it.

Never mind.  Off to Target for the $499 iPad with Retina Display plus they were offering coupons for credit buying other stuff.  (Actually the previous generation also had a retina display too.  So what's the difference?)  Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view), they had sold out.

Back to Radio Shack at KSC.  They said they didn't have it, but they called the Nuuanu store and they said they had itt.  But they were closing soon.  So I zoomed over there before closing time, but the door was already locked.  When I stayed at the door, they said their cash register was locked.  Only when I mentioned that call from the KSC store, they let me in.  They forgot the call from 10 minutes ago saying a customer was coming over for the tablet.

So I got the tablet.

This is the first tablet I ever owned or used extensively.  It took a while to charge up (like overnight).  And when that was done, it took a while to boot (like over 5 minutes if I remember correctly, but it booted up faster after the initial boot maybe a minute or two).  But when I finally got it going, it was fairly intuitive to use.  I started getting used to it.  But then noticed some flaws or annoyances.

Most annoying was the web browser.  It was excruciatingly slow.  One might suspect that my home wireless internet speed is too slow, but it seems fine on my Roku box.  It wasn't as bad using the gmail app.  Or the NBA Game Time app (where's the rebound column?).  Or the Yahoo Fantasy basketball app.  So I have to mostly blame the browser app.  Maybe it was because this tablet doesn't have enough RAM so it has to thrash to the storage memory.  Maybe I should have tried installing another browser.  But even the gmail app was slow at times, especially when loading graphics email.

The second annoyance was the battery life.  It seemed to last only about 3 hours.  What was worse was the tablet would suddenly power down even when the battery indicator showed it was above 50%.

The third annoyance is that the screen is virtually unreadable outdoors.  Even on a cloudy day.  Don't know if this is the case with all tablets (as I remember it was hard to see Kahoa's iPad display outdoors).  [Maybe I should get some polarized sunglasses.]  Here I see that the new iPad (the iPad 3) seems to be readable outdoors.  And according to this review the Google Nexus 10 "performs well in direct sunlight".

So what is it good for?  Well, I used it for reading/deleting gmail when I had to step away from my computer to keep the dog company when he was barking.  Slow but mostly tolerable.  It was good for Angry Birds.  I downloaded a couple of books in pdf format and used Adobe reader.

But I found the slow browsing/non-browsing unacceptable [the wait time was often minutes, not seconds] and decided to see if I could return it.  Hey, no problem Radio Shack took it right back and credited my credit card.  So despite the return, I wouldn't be averse to buying something from Radio Shack again due to their return policy.

***

I'm sure I'm going to buy a tablet one of these months/years.  The iPad is on the top of the list.  But the Google Nexus is also a candidate.  As well as the Kindle Fire (though the lack of apps might be the deal breaker).

But maybe I'll go for a laptop first.  That laptop with touchscreen at Costco is tempting.  Though about double the price of the low-end laptops I've been eyeing.

*** [12/30/12]

Alvin brought over his iPad2.  The Safari browser was pretty responsive on my wi-fi.  Yep, it was the tablet that was slow, not my wi-fi.