Yearly Archives: 2011

7″ Android Tablet Spec Comparison

1 minute, 38 seconds

For a long time I’ve always thought that tablets are not of much use until you reach the 3rd or 4th use case. You know, you have a laptop on which you can have 20 tabs of browsers open, have a full blown IDE to code in or even run a local instance of your dev environment. The second use case is your smart phone for when you’re on the go, don’t want any bulk or weight but still want to surf and check emails and listen to music. It’s not until you’ve got all those covered that you’ll consider spending hundreds of dollars on a 3rd device (or 4th if you have a desktop).

The wife is considering having a bigger screen than her Incredible to watch Netflix and read blog posts, news and library books on. This will likely spill over into reading kids books for our kids Emmett and Violet as well. Below are the tablets we’re considering. Each item has a product, review and purchase link in the first row. The second row is the presence or lack of a camera. While researching this piece I found Lisa G’s 7″ Tablet Smackdown on Mobile Tech and John P. Falcone’s Kindle vs. Nook vs. iPad on CNET reviews quite helpful. Also, those that wanna blow past the 7″ screen (to 7.7″) and $400 price should consider waiting for the Samsung Tab 7.7 ($600-$800 at this writing). Of course that depends on where you fall in regards to my and Moore’s law. Finally, if you’re looking for cellular connectivity, consider the T-Mobile Springboard .


Samsung Tab 7+ $399

HTC Flyer $299

IdeaPad A1 $229

Kindle Fire $199

Nook Tablet $249
ProductReview$ ProductReview$ ProductReview$ ProductReview$ ProductReview$
Front and Back Front and Back Front None None
1024 x 600 1024 x 600 1024 x 600 1024 x 600 1024 x 600
7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″ 7.7″ x 4.8″ x 0.52″ 7.68″ x 0.46″ x 4.90″ 7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″ 8.1″ x 5″ x 0.48″
12.1 oz 14.82 oz 14.08 oz 14.56 oz 14.08 oz
dual-core 1.2GHz 1.5GHz 1.0GHz dual-core 1.0GHz dual-core 1.0GHz
WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS WiFi WiFi
16GB Int & MicroSD 16GB Int & MicroSD 16GB Int & MicroSD 8GB Internal 8GB Int & MicroSD
Android 3.2 Android 2.3.3 Android 2.3 Android 2.3 Android 2.3

Update: I’ve added lil’ thumbnails for each tablet.

.everyother { background:#ddd; } .tablettable {border:1px solid black;}

Ashley’s Law vs Moore’s Law

1 minute, 3 seconds

I’ve been saying this for years, but there’s two laws out there when considering a new geek purchase. The first is Moore’s law which says:

The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every 18 months*.

Gordon E. Moore, 1965

Most people round down to a year from 18 months. Additionally most people say that, “Shit gets twice as good, twice as fast, twice as small every year.” Moral of the story? If you wait longer the money spent on the gizmo will go twice as far than if you bought today (* Mr. Moore updated this be 2 every years, but I’m ignoring this).

Conversely, I’ve always given the buying advice I call Ashley’s law:

If you don’t have it, you can’t use it.

Ashley Jones, 2011**

So, ya know, you’re limping along on that G4 iBook but don’t want to get a new laptop today because, “in just 8 months Apple’s gonna release the four gazillion hertz quintuple core laptop!!!” My logic says that the crazy slow laptop you’re using day in and day out really does suck. If you don’t have the new laptop, sure enough, you can’t use it (** I’ve been saying this for years, but am just now “publishing”).

Update: There’s a very unfortunate overlap with another much more serious, pre-existing Ashley’s Law. Well, they have disambiguation for a reason!

More water, more spider webs

0 minutes, 11 seconds

Apparently the shutterbug in me loves spiders as well as their webs when wet. Or, maybe I just need an excuse to try to master my (still some what) new camera.

In any case, here’s some water in the setting sun light:

Spiders abound

0 minutes, 13 seconds

I never really paid much attention, but apparently there is a spider season. We’re clearly in it! Tons of webs and tons of spiders. It’s cool.

Here’s one I found just around the corner of my house to compliment the web in my back yard from last post:

Spider web and Hard Drives

0 minutes, 13 seconds

What to do on a sunny weekend? Why, hose down your local spider web, line up hard drives and take videos and photos of them all, of course! It is pretty insane just how fast that hard drive head moves. Check out the video below.

Bees

0 minutes, 0 seconds

Woody’s B-Day

0 minutes, 15 seconds

I had a lovely time tonight celebrating my friend Bill’s birthday. Happy birthday Bill!

Here’s a photo; be sure to click through to see them all:

B-Day Dinner Fun

As well as two videos from the night. You had to be there:

Raise my taxes, please

0 minutes, 36 seconds

As we all know, there’s been a lot of movement in all levels of government around budget cuts instead of tax increases. I was inspired to make today’s post after reading Mr. Buffet’s op ed in today’s Times. Those of you that know me know that Warren and me are not anywhere near the same tax bracket. However, I feel we’re severely short changing our future by defunding critical programs. Having less social services, poorer quality health care and, pun intended, dumbed down education system won’t make us a richer country in the long run. Though I’m not sure I fully agree with the Nordic Model, there’s one aspect I do agree with. I think we should raise taxes, yes for the rich, but across the board as well .

Raise my taxes, please.

How much should you trust the cloud?

0 minutes, 57 seconds

Recently there was quite a bit of hubulub about Dropbox allowing everyone’s account to be accessed by anyone for 4 hours. This is bad, obviously. The guys over at Securosis got it right in their response. However, y’all should have known already to encrypt anything in the cloud if you were reading this here fine blog back in aught nine.

I clearly do not trust cloud, or really, any services online (I also take issue with “the cloud” being synonymous with “online”). The few online services I do use, I follow extremely good password practices. For example, my gmail password being over 20 characters of which I don’t know even know. Really, we should all be using two factor authentication to really lock things down.

I’m still quite concerned with a scenario where gmail is hacked site wide (not per use phished or even “whaled”). There’s nothing you can do in this scenario to protect yourself. How expensive in time, and potentially, literal money, is it worth to have a free service like gmail at the point it gets hacked? I’ve asked the same question myself and have even priced out other hosted, dedicated email services, free or no.

So, the point of this post is A) Nya nya, I told ya so and B) be safe!