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Blogging my conversion 4
By Rosie Perera | June 16, 2011 at 1:38 pm
The Canucks lost last night, in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, which was disappointing. When it was clear there was no way they’d be able to come back from behind I was already joking that it was time to go back home and play with my Android tablet. (See, I didn’t bring it with me, even though I was thinking about it; but I didn’t think I’d be able to get WiFi access where I was watching the game from.)
A couple of other observations: I am willing to accept more imperfections in texts I’m reading on this device than I ever have been before. Of course one rarely has any feeling of control when reading a book and coming upon a typo, so usually we have no choice but to ignore it and get on with life. However in printed books it’s much less common than in e-Books, in my experience. And as I mentioned before, in Logos I am accustomed to having the “Report Typo” feature. The first few times I encountered a typo (missing space between two words) in the book I’m reading on the Kindle app (The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You), I felt frustrated that I couldn’t report them. Now I’m realizing this book is filled with that problem and I’ve started just ignoring it. Will my tolerance level for poor quality go up? But I can hardly complain about poor quality. The readability of text in the Kindle app is pretty good.
I’m beginning to see that the expectation of high quality seems to be a luxury in an environment like Android Honeycomb which hasn’t had time to mature yet. The number of high quality apps is limited, so if I need a particular app, I’m more likely to settle for a generic one of lower quality if I can’t find one from my favorite software manufacturer or reputable content provider. For example, surprisingly Netflix doesn’t have an app for Android tablets yet, so I went looking around for other ways to watch movies. There are some websites where you can watch free public domain ones, but I haven’t been able to find anything comparable to Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” yet. As part of my “conversion” I’d been looking forward to finally getting a Netflix subscription after flirting with the idea for a long time.
It is nice learning this system with someone in the household who knows it already. My housemate has already taught me a couple of tips I never would have discovered on my own. You can rearrange the icons on your home page (Windows “desktop” equivalent), or remove them, by pressing and holding down for a second and then dragging them somewhere else or to the upper right corner, where a garbage can icon will appear. And one of the first things I learned from him was how to unlock the screen when I first turn the device on. You hold and drag the lock icon onto the unlock icon that shows up in the circle around it as soon as you press on it. That motion feels pretty cool.
Another motion that feels pretty cool, which my housemate told me about, is the labyrinth games where you can tilt the tablet and roll a little ball around in a maze, and hear the plunk when it goes into the hole. I just tried one (aTilt 3D Labyrinth) and it’s nice, but the tactile feedback isn’t quite as great as I’d been led to expect. Maybe there are other better ones. Well, I have too much other important stuff to do (thankfully) to spend a lot of time on games.
I’m also enjoying the fact that I can listen to a classical radio station on my tablet while doing other stuff. I downloaded the free TuneIn Radio app. Again, it limits me to only a few radio stations, so I have to accept what’s available. I’d prefer to listen to whatever radio station I choose that streams on the Internet, which I can do from my PC. But not here. That seems to be the theme for the day. I must accept more lack of choice and just enjoy what I’ve got. It’s mobile, so that should cover over a multitude of shortcomings, right? Well, it’s only mobile as long as I stay within WiFi availability. I am already considering whether I might buy an Android phone eventually….
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