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tideout
Joined: 12 Dec 2010
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 Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2012 5:15 am Post subject: |
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At the risk of taking the thread in a slightly off-direction - here goes.
How would people describe the "offline" capabilities of their tablets? I guess I'm tending toward either the Galaxy tab or the Asus Transformer at this point.
I've been in enough places, even an hour outside of a major east coast US city, where the internet possibilities were horrible. I won't even go into how limited some other ESL-related country's infrastructure is not exactly "cloud" ready. What frustrations have you had (maybe none?) with tablets and not being online?
For music related reasons I use VLC a lot on my laptop. I see there's a new android app for VLC (who knows how buggy but...) which I'd definitely want on any tablet I'd consider.
One last concern. Is it safe to assume that I'd be able to use VLC player and play downloaded videos directly from a micro SD card and not from an online source? I have a collection of videos related to hobbies etc. that I'd like to be able to play w/o being online.[/i] |
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six
Joined: 01 Oct 2010
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| Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2012 8:05 am Post subject: |
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| wintermute wrote: |
Could you compare the two? What turned you off android? |
ooh, I didn't even notice this til now, sorry. I had a Galaxy S1 from 2010 til 2011, let my friend take over my contract, then I got an S2 LTE HD. Android seemed fine at first because it was so open and I rooted my S1 with ease, applied lagfixes and all...however, the phone was pretty slow. It's natural because it was running old hardware and compared to the newer models, it couldn't keep up. That's fine. However, my Galaxy S2 HD LTE has been super slow constantly. I don't have many apps (my Applications tab shows about 16, none very large), I have a ton of free space on my phone's internal storage and SD card, and I have not modified it at all.
I had Swype on there from launch and I tried to get the Swype beta update because Samsung doesn't ever friggin update it themselves (PROBLEM) but at the time Swype wouldn't allow me to install the beta on a phone with Swype already installed. The solution? Root the phone. I go to find out how to root my phone and it has become exponentially more complicated. I'm fairly savvy and with some time I could get it done, but I don't see why rooting the phone went from a single APP to downloading a ton of custom ROMs and flashing the phone. Also, the idea that I have to root my phone to simply install the latest version of the software that runs on legit unrooted devices is abhorrent to me.
Finally, the reason I definitely cannot stand Android any more is the instability. Like I said, I'm not running anything out of the ordinary, yet my apps crash daily (not exaggerating, at least one app crashes every single day and it is by no means limited to a single one) and the phone experiences terrible slowdowns randomly. Furthermore, my battery life is being eaten alive by any open app -- I checked out my battery usage statistics and every app I use frequently is now over 10% of battery used... compare that to 1% or less for my Galaxy S1 and you can see that there is a problem.
One last thing, the phone will freeze for 1 minute sometimes or restart randomly. It can also 'lock the screen' which is my own phrase for making the screen stay dark yet continue to run, requiring me to remove the damn battery to restart it.
OK enough complaining about Android, let me tell you what I like about Apple.
I'm not into customizing the appearance of my OS, so if that's what you're into, ignore everything I say because iOS is not going to let you do that.
I like how smooth the iPad is. Everything opens instantaneously, there is no lag for anything, animations are smooth, and it turns on and shuts off immediately with no fuss. Apple clearly paid attention to its hardware when it designed iOS because every single aspect seems designed to synchronize perfectly with it. When I touch the screen, it registers my touch all the time and it does what I want it to do all the time.
I HATE FLASH and anyone who uses Flash as a selling point is just being contrarian. Yes it sucks that I can't watch thedailyshow or something on my iPad, but I don't really care 'cuz I have a VPN (which means Netflix works) which was super easy to set up and is super easy to log into with my iPad. I also bought CineXPlayer which lets me play all .avis and .mkvs that I want, so I have no problem with file formats and I don't have to waste time converting crap to iPad viewable format.
I love how long the battery lasts. I can use my iPad sporadically for over a week without charging it. I can watch a single episode of The Office on Netflix and lose 5% battery life tops. I don't play ANY android games and I have no desire to, yet I find myself playing DoDonPachi Resurrection and Ascension on the iPad because they are beautiful and it is satisfying to have such a large screen to touch.
I haven't had my iPad for that long, only a couple months now, but so far every experience has been incredibly positive. I've had some apps crash on me a couple times, but they crash and it just goes back to the home screen with no problem. The iPad finds WiFi networks before I even open it and doesn't waste too much battery doing it, unlike my stupid phone.
I know that some of my points are not anti-Android tablet (I hear they have good battery life too) but my experience with Android has gone from decent to negative to reprehensible so I will not try Android again until they get their stuff together. This post is so long... |
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tideout
Joined: 12 Dec 2010
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| Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2012 2:59 am Post subject: |
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six,
What's your experience offline vs. online? Is there any difference in using your apps?
It seems like the web has numerous postings by different tablet users with a wide variety of experiences using apps online vs. offline. I'm wondering if the latest Galaxy would make any difference with better processing power? |
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six
Joined: 01 Oct 2010
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| Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2012 8:06 am Post subject: |
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| No, there is no difference on both the iPad and the phone. |
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