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Blogging my conversion 5
By Rosie Perera | June 17, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Yesterday I picked up the keyboard dock for my Eee Pad Transformer. It is very nice to be able to type things in, much easier than using a virtual keyboard. This one is a full-sized keyboard with half-height keys, a sensible layout, and good tactile feedback, but the response time when typing with it seems to be a bit slow. Also there seem to be some situations when apps or edit boxes don’t accept input from the keyboard. One time it was because the keyboard wasn’t connected tightly enough to the tablet (it seems to get loose somehow sometimes, in spite of being locked in), but I am not sure that accounts for all the times the keyboard hasn’t worked. I haven’t figured out the pattern yet. I also realized that when I take the tablet out and about with me, I’m probably not going to want to bring it docked to its keyboard (I picked up a sleeve/stand for it which I’d use instead). I’ll probably only use the keyboard at home or on planes or long trips. But it doesn’t fit into the sleeve with the keyboard attached and it doesn’t dock into the keyboard when it’s in its sleeve, so I’ll have to take it in and out of the sleeve. Bit of a pain. I’ll use a netbook sleeve when carrying the device around docked to its keyboard.
The best thing about the keyboard dock is has an extra battery in it. I’ve been using this thing for several hours now since I charged it, and it still shows 94% battery capacity remaining. Woohoot! It’s going to be amazing for long flights.
I’ve now sunk to a new low. I used my Eee Pad while sitting on the toilet — its lightweight profile makes that a new possibility which I wouldn’t have dreamed of with my laptop.
I’m realizing how easy it is to drop by defenses and give out my Google email address all over the place. I’ve now downloaded a few apps that required registration and I gave my Google email address. So now Google is building up a profile of me that includes what magazines I like to read, and so on.
I’ve discovered some more useful apps that I downloaded:
• Read It Later – I’ve added the Firefox add-on for this too, and now when I’m surfing around on the web on my PC and find an article I want to read, I can just click the Read It Later icon and it will show up in my Read It Later list on my Android. It provides a great reading environment, strips out all the ads and junk on the page and formats the text nicely.
• Google Reader – for reading blogs and other RSS feeds
• Google Goggles – you take a photo of something, and Google can search and find more about it for you; this works best with certain identifiable things such as a painting, a book cover, a recognizable landmark, etc.; watch the video I just linked to for a cool demo
• xPiano – a simple 4-octave piano app
• Dropbox – for file sharing between my PC and my Android, though using the USB cable is the easier way
• Adobe Reader – for reading PDF files
These are mostly free apps. The only one I’ve had to pay for so far is Read It Later ($2.99), and I think that’s going to turn out to be one of my favorites, so it’s more than worth it.
A couple of apps I’ve downloaded which have so far been disappointing, or I haven’t been able to get to work:
• CNN – when I launch it, it sits forever saying “Loading…” with the spinning progress icon
• Shazam – supposed to be this awesome app with which you can record an excerpt of a song you hear on the radio or wherever, and it will identify the song for you and who it’s by. But it won’t complete the Setup process. It says “Please try later.” I don’t know what’s the hangup. I’ve tried over and over again these past couple of days. Maybe it doesn’t work in Canada?
Some apps don’t auto-rotate between portrait and landscape mode and/or are made only for Android phones and are not optimized for the larger tablet screen. This is annoying. Google Reader seems to be one of the latter, as is Google News.
My housemate who helped me shop for this said that users of mobile tablets increasingly become consumers of content than they’d ever been before. They have this thing, so they find themselves watching movies more, etc., just because they can. I can see this potentially having that effect on me. I’ve already subscribed to one magazine and might get more if I can find more of my favorites (they don’t have Wired for Android tablet yet — which was surprising; that’s one I’d really like to have; but they’re working on it and it’s going to be pretty cool, with animated and interactive bits).
I’ve noticed that the on/off switch is unpredictable. It is used for turning the machine on from a completely “off” state and also waking it back up from hibernation (which it goes into after a certain timeout period, which is configurable), as well as turning it completely off. But I’m not sure whether you’re supposed to press with normal pressure and release it quickly, press really hard, press and hold, or press it twice to get the thing to come on from these two different states, or whether it depends on which state you’re in. Sometimes it goes on at once with a quick normal press, but sometimes it requires a second or harder or longer press. Maybe my unit is just flaky, but it seems not to work consistently, and I haven’t figured out the pattern yet.
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