OT: Android tablet forum or usenet group?

On Tuesday 09 April 2013 10:45 Roger Mills wrote in uk.d-i-y:

The forums (and there are many) are very noisy.

I would recommend just googling for:

Android Tablet Review

and limit the search range to the last year.

For my 2ps worth, Asus and Samsung make nice things in the Android line.

But there are others...

Until you know exactly what you want it is hard to go wrong with one of the incredibly cheap 7" Neuropad at about £55 on Amazon (no HDMI port).

I got one to play with as a possible Skype phone for my parents. Don't expect anything useful by way of manuals at that price.

It connected to my WiFi easily enough with minimal effort on my part - indeed the signal was better than on the iPad.

If anyone knows of a manual for this actual model I'd be interested.

Also a really good user reference for Android ICS I would be interested. I get by with this (wrong aspect ratio but ~OK):

YMMV

Personally can't fault my Google Nexus 7 tablet. Feels well made, decent s ize, spec is good. And in theory as it is a Nexus device should keep well up to date with latest Android developments.

Only mild frustration is the inability (without "rooting") to add additiona l storage capacity via USB / SD card but 16Gb is enough for me.

Size matters - my dad tried out my Nexus 7 and decided to go for a full blo wn iPad2 in the end as he found 7 inches too small (where have I heard that before.... ;-) )

Depends on the requirements too - if it is "just" for facebook, browsing, e mail handling - the cheap as chips ones will do just as well, and you won't be as frustrated when you stand on it and have to buy a new one!

Matt

Maybe a stupid question, but can these tablets access networked hard drives?

in general yes they can. Usually via wifi.

Cheers.

or the NATPC 7 inch for about £80; Android 4.1, has an SD socket

Mine (Samsung Tab II) can, I use an app ES File Explorer, not sure if the device has anything supplied but the app is free.

Yup, with the right software. ES file explorer is a fairly standard file manager etc that will access everything from internal flash storage, to SMB/CIFS shares, FTP sites etc. The native OS can also create VPN tunnels, so you can "phone home" for access id you have a VPN capable router.

wrote: [snip]

Well on my iPad/Phone fire up FileExplorer log on to the NAS and navigate to the file(s) of interest. Works with any NAS that supports Samba or AFP or NFS or FTP.

On Tuesday 09 April 2013 20:36 Steve Firth wrote in uk.d-i-y:

And there are apps that can do SFTP access.

news:comp.mobile.android

Also Modaco and XDA Developers are good forums. There's a variety of AndroidSomething forums too, but I can never remember which ones I've been looking at.

Theo

I'd be skeptical that a good tablet could be sold for that little cash.

To the OP: If you want something portable a 7" tablet like the Nexus 7 is a good option. If it's mainly for 'coffee table' use then I prefer a larger 10" tablet for the larger screen. I'm very pleased with a Galaxy Tab 2 10" although I may have bought the Nexus 10 if it had been available at the time.

I can't recall if anyone else has mentioned it but I have found the site

In message , Mark writes

Well, I invested in an earlier Wondermedia 50quid tablet, and have been generally very happy with it for maybe a year or so.

I bought it to see if I could write and run simple apps, and to see what use a pad would be.

The instructions were hopeless, and I had to do a lot of digging on the various forums, which indeed have a high noise to signal ratio.

I flashed the tablet to a different "rom", and could do almost everything I've seen mentioned here - play video from a server, email, YouTube and so on - and I am not sure what iPad owners got for all the extra cash.

Mine had Android 2, and that did seem to be a problem because it thinks it's a phone not a pad (can anyone confirm that Android 4 cures this?), which affects some applications, and it had a resistive rather than capacitive screen. This took a bit of getting used to, but does have the advantage that you can poke accurately at the screen with anything handy, rather than needing a special stylus, for precise work. Mine had an RJ45 network socket as well as the rather mediocre wifi - this seems rather unusual.

I'm about to re-sell mine, having decided that these things are more fashion items than utilitarian devices like a laptop. A son, who does a lot of train and plane travelling has moved from laptop to Acer i5 processor Win8 pad. Expensive, but I can see why he needed it.

I'd advocate the cheap pad as a starter device rather than just trying to read about it. There are some videos on YouTube and one or two even have some useful content.

Given that you can buy a s/h Asus eee laptop for about £50, I don't see the point of tablets.

They key feature for me is screen resolution.

If you want to view web sites and read content easily then I think you need about 1200*800 resolution as a minimum.

All the budget tablets I've seen so far have a much lower resolution.

Not much good having access to loads of content and then not being able to read it properly.

Cheers

Dave R

Agreed, that's the biggest difference I've seen. I'm a Chrome user on the desktop, and love the fact that my Nexus 7 syncs bookmarks between instance s of Chrome on all the PCs I use. Just waiting to get my phone on Jelly Be an (Android 4.1.2) too so that I can seamlessly operate from one device to another.

Matt

Yes, I got a bit bored listing protocols. If anyone is seriously interested I recommend SkyJos FileExplorer for iOS. It supports just about every way of connecting to a NAS and does neat tricks such as loading files into apps that don't themselves provide direct access to a NAS. For example it will load ebooks into Stanza, Bluefire, Kindle etc, it can either stream video from the file or load a video file into the iOS video app and will transfer office documents into the Office2 App. It also has a good range of built in file viewers.

There's a freeware version and a paid for version which costs £1.99 which seems peanuts given the effort that must have gone into creating it.

It works with my QNAP NAS, a homebrew Linux NAS and cloud storage.

Yes. More is handy.

IIRC the Nexus 10 has the highest resolution.