Recently I got an Acer Iconia Tab A500 tablet and I've been meaning to get one of those fancy mobile internet devices for myself. I've always had a plan to unstrap myself on the computer chair for all the online tasks I demand. This idea spawned from using the Zaurus SL-5600 for a good year or so and while the machine was mostly insufficient for even for simple browsing, it was a brief glimpse into this vision of being online anywhere, everywhere. I had thought of several options, from netbooks to perhaps another laptop, but I knew this was not the optimum solution. I owned a laptop for many years now, and it has not particularly been portable. Of course, it weighed a ton, which did nothing to help the situation.
When I saw what tablets could do, it did not even strike me to use it, but I suppose the interest grew and as I evaluated the propositions, I started to see some value in them. They were many times more easier to interface with, and the wifi connectivity was very good. The biggest trouble I have ever had with my Zaurus was simply running out of memory and that problem seemed to crop up at every turn with it. Even using my brother's mobile phone to surf the web was an exacting experience. While analyzing modern tablets, I saw this problem didn't even exist and that was a very important key to this. It seemed to be the natural solution of what I was after.
Selecting the Acer Iconia had then become weighing through different options. The plan was to get a proper ssh client and VNC viewer so that I could still do some work while away from my office that I had become so entrenched in. The next step was to have very good Google services support seeing that I was almost embedded into Google's ecosystem. Everything else was gravy as far as I was concerned. It had to be an Android, and the price had to be reasonable.
At first, I was interested in one of those Chinese knock offs, Wopad. The i7 builds seem to solve much of the processing power issues the first editions had. Its price was also extremely attractive but shouldn't really be a surprise judging that it does come from China. But, there was something about it that I just couldn't get around to. It was support. You'd be getting this neat device for a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than the regular tablets, but what happens when you have problems? Who do you go to? Don't know? I thought so.
Chopping those cheap ones off put the choices down to Samsung's offering as well as Acer's and Asus'. All three are pretty good machines, though I found the Galaxy tabs here to be much older models and those definitely did not attract. Asus meanwhile seemed to be a tad bit more expensive than Acer's proposition and what I got from it was much, much less. Acer it is, and to this day, I'm quite happy with it.
For the most part, I've read that the Acer Iconia Tab is a pretty hefty device, but since I haven't handled much in terms of tablets, I did not have any preconceived notion of just what was light. I got around the weight issues pretty quickly and settled in on the device. Having a capacitive touch screen display was an eye opener as the last quasi-tablet I handled was Toshiba's ultra portable with a resistive touch screen. It ran on Windows and it was such a pain to use. This tablet's touch screen was very sensitive and at times seemed too much to handle. The availability of a full-sized USB port also made some of the transition very easy, allowing me to plug in flash drives and transferring files. Overall I was pleased, but it was not all rosy with this.
Software seemed to be the biggest issue with Android. Going through Android's Market was like entering a flea market and you just never know what you get. There's a lot of stuff, and a lot of it, you don't really know if you'll ever need. Some of the stuff just simply does not work and it would be ideal if Google could separate the glitchy apps from the stable ones. Perhaps they haven't because surprisingly, Google Docs is one of those crazy malfunctioning apps. It pains me to have to work with this and Android's crappy soft keyboard. I was on the verge of screaming for directional keys as the cursor would almost always jump too far with the touch screen. For those who had those problems, pickup the Hacker's keyboard. It's a god-send for me and it made the app much more bearable. It also works great on my ssh client, ConnectBot (I think), which allowed tab support (Yippee!). Google Docs had even more issues though, with the cursor not being aligned to where the letters were going to show up. I hope that this is going to get sorted soon.
Games are also absolutely nothing to write about here. Acer's tablet came with Hero of Sparta, Let's Golf and Need for Speed: Shift and the only game worthwhile there is EA's work. I was very skeptical with NFS, tilt racing, but the end result is surprisingly natural. The game also looks very good for portable devices. The other game that really shone for me was Galaxy on Fire 2, which had that Freelancer kind of feel, if you want some space flight sim-ish game. The virtual control stick is just awful for mining though it may just require more time to adjust. I really wanted to try Nova 2 from Gameloft but their site seems to keep me from downloading any trial version. Speaking of trial, I also wanted to get Riptide GP demo, but it just wasn't around at all. To wrap up the disappointment, I really wanted Sims 3 and it seemed that the Android Market just refuses to list the game down for me.
Other apps that were very useful for me were ES File Explorer as this allowed me to access my Samba file server and pull up mp3s, videos and pdfs. It was very good and the interface was very nice. VNC Viewer I used was called android-vnc-viewer and while it works well, it is kind of unstable especially when I try to touch the display with more than one finger (for some reason). Using it needs some getting used to, but it works and that's all that matters for me.
Lastly, there's this thing about syncing back to a desktop. I read about being able to connect to Ubuntu and after taking much consideration, I figured that the mtpfs drivers that were used to interface with the device should be mature enough but the support libraries in Karmic were just too old. I decided to just use my XP Virtualbox install and expose the tablet to it. For some reason, I have to turn off USB debugging on my tablet to get the entire setup working, but it did work. I manage to copy stuff into and out of the device and that works just fine for me.
Tablets do address specific needs and I can certainly understand that better now. It isn't for everyone, but if you're looking for some robust online device on the go, then look no further.
