Front Row Crew Forum

Hitman Hart said:

The iPad will require iTunes to transfer through and you won't be able to download files to store them on the iPad directly.

Well, that kind of kills the iPad for me then. I don't want to have to use iTunes, and if I can't easily transfer and use PDFs on the iPad there's no reason for me to have one of those. If I got a Galaxy, it'd have to be one of the 10" screen ones, as smaller isn't worth it for me. Smaller is fine for my ebooks, but anything with graphs and flow charts would be harder to follow.

On to Newegg I go!

SquadronROE said:

Hitman Hart said:

The iPad will require iTunes to transfer through and you won't be able to download files to store them on the iPad directly.

Well, that kind of kills the iPad for me then. I don't want to have to use iTunes, and if I can't easily transfer and use PDFs on the iPad there's no reason for me to have one of those. If I got a Galaxy, it'd have to be one of the 10" screen ones, as smaller isn't worth it for me. Smaller is fine for my ebooks, but anything with graphs and flow charts would be harder to follow.

On to Newegg I go!

That is not the only way to manage files on an iPad. A program called Goodreader goes a good job of managing files and the dropbox app reads PDFs natively and whatever you drop in to your dropbox folder just appears.

The 32gig Xoom is $350 on Woot today.

Is anyone curious about the Kindle Fire? I glanced over the news articles & took a look at it's amazon page, it looks neat, shiny and at the right price of $199. No camera or microphone, though, are those really necessary on a tablet? Runs android OS.

I'm curious about how the iOS 5 cloud initiative is going to change things. We'll find out soon enough.

http://forum.frontrowcrew.com/index.php?p=/discussion/8597/tablets-the-ipad-kind

Hey all! My kindle died recently so I'm looking at getting a tablet as a replacement. I was considering the Kindle Fire due to it's low price, but I wanted to see if anyone here owned a tablet and, if so, what you thought about it.

Mine would be so very awesome had it 1) Had any programs written for it (it'll get Android stuff in February, but I kinda want, like, proper GTK and Linux applications. Currently it has like, maybe, 8.) 2) The battery lasted at least a day of use.

I'm considering buying a Nook tablet. You can side load apps from which I gather you do from a sd card. By side loading you can have access to the Kindle store. You can also root it fairly easily it seems and have a full blown android tablet with access to the android market. Hardware specs are decent as well.

Blackberry playbooks are pretty cheap now. At office max they had the 16 gig model for $200, and you can convert android apps to run on it so those of you looking at a kindle fire might want to check it out.

But for $50 more you could get the new Nook tablet...

Also for 50 bucks more you get more memory and a fast processor on the Nook tablet.

So... turns out my Playbook's bootloader only allows stuff signed by RIM, so I can't get Linux on it. Even though Blackberry support totally said I could! I was like "Yo will putting Linux on it go against TOS?" and they were like, actually, they said, this is a quote;

Kelly - BlackBerry Customer Support said:

Regarding your inquiry with adding Linux software to your BlackBerry PlayBook, you can do this if you wish, but it is not recommended by RIM, as it will not be supported, and will void your warranty. You would be able to go back to QNX, but again this would not be support by RIM.

I've had several emails from Blackberry support with typos or bad grammar. =P

Here's what I've done to it:
Rooted it.
Installed Gapps
Installed GoLauncher EX
Installed Homecatcher to redirect the Nook Key to GoLauncher
Installed Amazon Appstore
Installed Winamp (pleasantly surprised it does the intelligent thing of storing synced files to the sdcard rather than to the internal memory.


Also, watching High School of the Dead on Netflix streaming.

This is so awesome! If only I could get it to connect to my phone's ad-hoc wifi access point.

Very awesome! I ended up with an iPad 2 and it works perfectly for what I want. Many nights of watching Ponies has been had with it.

Listening to the the most recent Geek Nights right now and Rym is telling his story about how people on the subway approached him about the book he's reading for the book club had me thinking about e-readers/Kindles. Normally people will see what book you're reading and strike up a conversation when they see what you're reading and have a similar interest. This sort of thing goes away when you are reading things on a tablet.

Just a random thought.

ninjarabbi said:

Yet another benefit of ereaders ;)

I think it goes both ways. There are some titles I really don't want others to know I'm reading, while at the same time you miss out on the opportunity of meeting new people or having interesting conversations.

Anybody scope out the new Asus Transformer Prime? It looks really nice but cost about as much as a Ipad 2. Even still it's probably one of the best Android tablets out there so far.

Right now if I was going to buy a 10 inch android tablet, It would be the Transformer prime. I really like the dock. It actually has a touchpad so you can really use it like a laptop when its in the dock. I wish it weren't so expensive though. When you combine the Tablet and the dock, It's almost enough to buy myself a new pc which would probably give me a lot more use.

I like the look of the Acer Iconia 7 inch tablet. Its only around $250 (at walmart, at least) and it seemed really nice when I was messing around with it at best buy. The only real flaw I can see is that it only has a 5 hour battery life. I think I'd still pick that over the Kindle fire or Nook tablet though.

My friend has a 10 inch thrive and it seems pretty nice, but it is a beast. Its probably twice as thick as any of the other tablets out there. I really like the Galaxy tab 7+/7.7 but they're both pricey as well.

iPad mini is coming.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120229PD220.html

I doubt they'll actually make a smaller iPad, honestly, but I could see them having some produced just to test it out. The production date is off for a release, too, cause the iPad announcement event is next Wednesday. I'm confident enough that they're gonna be announcing a "retina" dpi iPad that I already sold my current one :P

Josh Bytes said:

iPad mini is coming.

Negatory megatron. Apple doesn't want to fragment its resolutions like that. I'm 99.9% sure they're sticking with iPhone 3G, iPhone retina (2x), iPad, and iPad retina (2x). It makes things like subpixel smoothing and such really easy for developers, and makes the resulting apps look more polished and professional.

My prediction for March 7th: Retina Display iPad 3, 1080p iTunes video, possibly a different sized connector, maybe some kind of TV thing.

I don't know why people are so easily convinced that iPad retina is coming. It's next to impossible. Here are the many reasons why.

We have only seen proof that a display with pixels as small as the retina display can be manufactured in quantity at a reasonable price at a size of 3.5". There is no evidence of even a prototype of such a display at 9.7", let alone being able to be mass manufactured at a reasonable price. Apple is very secretive, but it's much more likely that it just doesn't exist.

The resolution would be something close to 2660 x 1770. The 27" Apple monitor is 2560 by 1440. It's literally impossible to develop apps for a retina iPad because nobody has a monitor that can display them.

Even powerful desktop PCs that don't care about power consumption will have trouble rendering things at a resolution so high with a decent frame rate. Most likely you are going to need high end GPUs with big ass fans that eat up all the watts. How exactly do you expect an iPad to be able to render anything at that kind of resolution without eating the entire battery? What happens when somebody decides to play Infinity Blade 2? What GPU in the world even exists that you could put in there? If NVidia or AMD makes such a GPU, I want it in my desktop PC right now.

A retina display that is around 7" is much more believable. The resolution would be closer to 2070x1370. Even so, that is still insane. It would be like having a magical time machine and traveling into the future to skip a generation of technology.

Imagine if the Google glasses come out, and they are perfect amazing like what you imagine in sci-fi novels and movies. That is impossible. You know they are going to be janky, and have issues with focus, glare, battery, and all sorts of things. If there is a 7" or a 9" retina display, that would be an incredible leap forward in display technology. It will happen one day, but I have extreme doubts that it will happen next week.

If I'm wrong, I'll eat a hat and buy an iPad.

I wonder if apple will just make an iPad with a higher resolution display and CALL IT a retina display.