Cooking with Music

With the purchase of the new MiniTop for the car, and the subsequent lack of GPS making it a bit useless for that, the reserve function got setup.

In the kitchen before this was a laptop on top of the fridge and some speakers under the upper cupboards with a sub on top. 

Replacing all of this:

...with this:

The volume knob also shifted with the reduction in cabling to under the cupboards against the fridge. Substantially tidier than before and sit next to the tablet itself.

The tablet will go into a wooden surround to hold it in place more securely, once it's made, which it isnt yet. So in the mean time it'll sit on top of the chopping board.

So far it's a success! although it's not hooked up to the music store as yet. But it will be.

The £27 Tablet - JXD S18

It's really hard to believe that a tablet can be under £30. I mean seriously, a dual core 4GB tablet, with a touch screen (granted its resistive, thus cheaper), and its not exactly a winner in style. But that doesn't get part the point that this tablet was shipped to me for £27. The cheapest shipping i've seen from China is north of a fiver for a small packet, which means this is basically twenty pounds of tablet.

So, granted it was free shipping, it took a while. Roughly 4 weeks ago I ordered it on a whim via Paypal, with a credit card the website (www.fasttech.com) looks legit, but so do LOTS of scams these days, but sure enough, it arrived. Paypal seems OK, as does the credit card, so thus far it doesn't look like it's been skimmed.

Anyway, risks and bad stuff aside, here it is. the cheapest tablet I've ever seen. I'll blame the post for the crumpled box forcing it through my letter box (thanks Royal Mail) and in fairness, I had opened already opened it it by the time I took this.

Oh wow! Instructions!... are not a lot of use (unsurprisingly).

The tablet itself, 4.3" screen, 4GB memory (roughly 1GB space to apps and stuff), microSD slot, WiFi, 3.5mm jack and a micro USB to charge and transfer stuff.

It came pre-installed with Android 4.1 which was nice, and after reading a few reviews found a few issues which actually haven't panned out as bad as they were presented.

Problem 1:

One reviewer had poor quality and sound level from the jack, but the speaker was fine, blaming it being cheap. Mine works perfectly well so i'll chalk that up to a dodgy unit. 

Problem 2:
No dedicated Home button, however, given a bit of exploring the power button, when held down to turn it off (for about a second or two) gives two options, Power Off, or Home. So, negated again. There are also a few other buttons in the form of rocker switches, one for volume up and down and the other works as a back button and settings button.

Problem 3:
The touchscreen isn't very responsive. Well, its resistive, so it wont be, I really don't know what people expected from something this cheap. It's still multi-touch and in all honesty it's not like i have to drag my nail across it and scratch the surface to do anything, its just a slightly firmer press than a 'normal' (read capacitive) phone screen.

Problem 4:
The resolution is low. Yes, yes it is. It also said the resolution when you buy it and given its a small screen, you're not going to get retina levels of ppi. The only down side I found was the grid on the home screens is 4x2 default, which is a bit small. Quick applications of a custom UI (Launcher Pro) and it works just as well in 4x3, giving a little more room and with smaller icons, a slightly better image.

The plan for this was to combine it into the dashboard of my golf for sat-nav suing my phone as a WiFi hotspot. The problem being (and maybe i got carried away with just how cheap it was) I over looked it doesn't have GPS.

And really, I don't care! I've got other uses for this in mind (even when I bought it, i had more than one idea) so it'll still work perfectly fine for what I want (I hope). And if it doesn't, I still wont care, because i'll find a use for it somewhere, even if its just a toy to marvel at how stupidly cheap things can be.

Once i've had a play with it a little more using googlemaps and WiFi location data and post some more findings. Maybe it will end up in the golf after all.

Where did all my time go?

Once again, the more often I promise myself I'll stay on top of updates the less often I seem to get things posted. Then suddenly I have a bit of time and the updates cone flooding in. That's not to say this is one of those updates, merely a post for the sake of posting as well as musing over the latest addition to to my gadget selection.

For a while I've pondered getting a tablet, specifically not an ipad. Not that I object to it as such, but the control apple has over it compared to android in terms of layout on screen to name just one niggle. That being said, the it does have one thing right; aspect ratio. 4:3 is just right, there's nothing wrong per say with widescreen for most tasks, but in landscape, and with a keyboard on screen, and there's precious little room for both decent size keys and view the for what you've typed.

After seeing a suspiciously cheap range of tablets in Maplin Electronics I had a look and found almost all to be widescreen, and including the temptingly priced 7" unit from £99. However, I interestingly for not much more was an 8" 4:3 ratio tablet, men as well as two 9.7" models under £200. The 8" was ultimately a bit small and in the end suffered from exactly the same problem the other two had.

All three ran Ice Cream Sandwich, another requirement for any tablet is got, and but crucially lacked access to the market, and or as it is now Google Play. Apparently these devices haven't been certified or approved by Google thus they don't get to benefit from the wealth of applications they have to offer.

While it's possible to get it to work via a work around, stick with the inferior or limited GetJar or Amazon application stores. Having apps which I use on my phone unavailable or unwilling to work put me off. Ideally I want something that will 'just work' despite being happy to to hack things into working, and it's nice to not have to every time.

By chance I remembered a friend had bought an HP TouchPad specifically to run ICS and it was perfectly happy. Minimal hacking required and everything worked just as any other android device would expect.

One browse of ebay later and a unit with a dock, a case and charger was about to finish. Luckily it didn't go much and so far, the other than finding it needs a LOT of power to charge (2 amps down a usb cable) its great!

I might even get a chance to post some more stuff soon.