Common Fate of Android Tablets, or a Quick 2013 Nexus 7 Review

I'm on my third Android tablet. Or fourth, but who's counting?

My first tablet was a Samsung Galaxy 5 bought in September 2012. This was mis-marketed as an MP3 player, which it did fine, but 5" was a great size for a handheld GPS device walking through cities, and fit easily into most pockets. It included an FM receiver, rear and front facing cameras, etc. I liked it. The big drawbacks were that it was too small for most reading or surfing activities, and it didn't have enough RAM to upgrade past Android 2.3.5. In December I managed to find the one place on Charles Ave where there was a drop-off between the sidewalk and the adjacent turf, stepped wrong, and fell, landing on my shoulder and on the Galaxy that had slipped out of my chest pocket. No Gorilla glass on this one.

I replaced it with a Nexus 10, decided that was too big, and replaced that immediately with a 2012 Nexus 7.

The Nexus 7 was overall fine, but the sound quality of the built-in speakers was terrible and produced insufficient volume to listen to podcasts or streaming radio from just a few feet away or with any background noise. The UI was sluggish. Touch a search area, and wait a few seconds before the keyboard appears. Type a key, and wait a few seconds before the character appears on the screen. No built-in FM receiver, but with TuneIn, this is not usually a big deal. Other than the speakers, the largest deficiency was the lack of a rear-facing camera.  Got QR Droid? You won't be using it on this thing. I also found 16 GB to be slightly restrictive, but of course there is AndFTP's sftp feature, and my home desktop runs an sftp server, so moving stuff back-and-forth was a breeze--a great improvement over plugging in the USB cable and hoping Linux decides to recognize the device. Anyhow, I get around 20Mb/s between my Nexus and desktop via 802.11 (and an Ethernet hop). The one time I had two droids downloading from the server concurrently I got 30Mb/s measured at the server. Not bad.

I liked the size of the Nexus 7: fairly easy to hand-carry, and I picked up a small messenger bag that can carry that and a few other things while I wander about listening to podcasts.

Friday I dropped my Nexus 7. Even though it was in a decent M-Edge cover, the screen cracked, and much of the screen no longer behaves as a touch screen. No Gorilla glass on this one, either.

So I picked up a 2013 Nexus 7. I have not had it long, but my initial impression is that Asus did a great job. The sound quality is okay, but importantly it can kick out enough volume to be easily heard from several feet away. The UI is more responsive than the older Nexus 7. The rear-facing camera is a great addition. 32 GB of flash memory is a big improvement over my past 16 GB--I won't have to juggle among movies on the device.

I'll probably write more about the 2013 Nexus 7 later.

Aside: the guy from the Office Depot (la oficina de la marihuana) really, really wanted to sell me a protection plan for the Nexus. He went so far as to tell me I'd probably want to replace the battery in a year or so. Despite my tendency to break things, I never buy protection plans, as they are usually pure profit for the seller.

A Milestone of Sorts

It used to be whenever I bought a new computer, I went into it thinking it'd run around $2k. My Kaypro 4-84+88 was $2k in 1984, my Amiga was $1500 or so in '86 or '87, but came in around $2k with accessories (RAM, 5.25" floppy, etc.). I bought a few PCs from the '90s to a couple years ago that were all in the $2k ballpark. Of course, each one was far more powerful than the one before. Lately when I've priced desktops it's become clear that $2k is now excessive for my needs, or at least as long as I'm not running Vista. I've also bought laptops (kinda in the Kaypro spirit), and the constant was that a laptop would be noticeably more expensive than a comparable desktop. This doesn't seem true anymore. I just bought a Samsung NC10 Netbook, $480 from Amazon. This is a sweet little machine, weighing under 3 pounds and having long battery life (I haven't quite figured out how long, yet). It does come loaded with useless junk, but not as much as my Dell laptop did. And it came with XP, so I've still managed to completely avoid Vista. Speaking of Vista, xkcd just weighed in: Anyhow a dual core CPU, surprisingly low energy consumption, a GB of RAM, and 160GB of hard drive space for under $500. This is good.

My Last Mile

This fall I've made major changes to the wires running into my house and thought I'd take a minute to discuss Internet provider options in suburban Baltimore. Right now I'm using XOHM 802.16 (WiMAX) service at home. I get good performance--better than my prior DSL--and the price is good. In a money-saving move, I no longer have a land line, so I had to ask Credo to boost my anytime minutes (now 450/month) and shift the beginning of my off-peak minutes from 9pm weeknights to 7pm.

 To quote David Byrne, "well, how did I get here?" I moved to Baltimore County in 2005. At the time, it seemed natural to go with Verizon for phone and DSL. I already had a Verizon cell phone. I chose Working Assets (now Credo) for long distance service. The Verizon DSL was poor from day one. I spent a lot of time on the phone with Verizon technical support that year, including much time on hold, with their IVR, and with actual support personnel. Their IVR said my line checked out fine, so it seemed the obvious thing to do would be to swap out my DSL modem or check theirs at the CO. I couldn't get them to take that simple step or to send a tech out to diagnose the problem. The DSL was so bad that I often dialed in to UMBC's 56kb/s modem bank (which I think is now gone). The land line service was exceptionally poor as well, very noisy.

 In the meantime, Verizon was unable to combine my land line and cell bills. They kept touting "one bill," telling me that they'd take care of it, and then a few weeks later I'd get a letter explaining that the bills couldn't be combined, with no explanation. Then I'd talk to customer service, a friendly rep would assure me she'd take care of it, and a few weeks later I'd get the same letter once again. I went through three iterations of this. I suspect the problem was that the cell phone had a Frederick, MD number, and Frederick's a couple counties over.

When my year with Verizon was up, I switched to CavTel for land line and DSL and Credo for cellular. CavTel uses Verizon's network, but charges customers less and has much better customer service. Credo uses Sprint's network, as of 2005 charged customers less, and has very good customer service. The CavTel DSL did not work--they use Verizon's lines, after all. But, after a call to CavTel customer service, a Verizon truck showed up in the alley behind my place, the line was fixed, and DSL worked reliably the rest of the time I was a CavTel customer. When they fixed the DSL, the noise on the land line cleared up as well. I was a happy CavTel customer, but paying $80 monthly for Internet and phone.

Enter Comcast, claiming $62 monthly Internet and phone. I'd heard bad things about Comcast's customer service and network reliability, but I decided to give them a shot. Note: this was about when XOHM started offering service in the area, and I think Comcast's lower prices are the result of competition, something that Comcast and Verizon don't have much of a history of. The Comcast tech came, did the install, and I was happy. The service was fast.

I wasn't happy for long, though. The Comcast Internet service worked for about 4 hours. I talked to technical support and they said it was a database problem that would be fixed in 24-72 hours. 72 hours later, still no Internet service. In the meantime, I noticed that the Comcast phone was noisy (not as bad as Verizon had been) and every time I picked the handset up, I got the staccato dial tone, indicating voice mail present. But there usually wasn't voice mail. So if they don't know how to install service and they can't fix what they claimed was a simple database problem, I don't want anything to do with them.

So I decided to disconnect Comcast service. A funny thing about disconnecting: when I went through their IVR and selected reduce or disconnect service, it put me on hold. I had stuff to do, so I hung up and dialed back in, but this time I selected add features. They picked up right away, and the woman I got was able to schedule the disconnect. But she said it would take about a week and a half. The next day I called back for a clarification of where I had to drop off their cable modem, and was told the billing would stop as soon as I returned the modem. It didn't but their customer service says they've taken care of it. Hope so.

 So everything about Comcast, and everything about Verizon in Baltimore County, was negative. I'd been okay with Verizon in the past, but hadn't really needed their technical support before, so maybe I'd just been lucky. So, no land line and no Internet service. What's a guy to do? The most economical approach appeared to be upgrading my cell plan with Credo and going with XOHM, $25/month now, going up to $35/month later. I decided to give this a try.

I'm happy with XOHM. I'm at the edge of their service area, which concerned me a bit, but I am getting around 2-4Mb/s consistently. My first XOHM modem/router stopped connecting to the network several days after starting the service, but the second tech support guy I talked to said "Your modem's acting weird. Take it back to where you got it and exchange it." This was NTI Wireless, a friendly little shop pretty close to my house. I exchanged the modem, and everything's been fine since. About XOHM customer service: this is Sprint, and one of the reasons I like Credo is that they isolate me from Sprint customer service. CavTel and Credo have the tremendous advantage of being larger customers than I am, and so have some voice with the actual network provider. So, XOHM is Sprint. Sprint has a very large investment in XOHM, and they're not making money off it yet. But they're rolling it out to other cities now, apparently DC and Annapolis recently. They need to make it work, and this isn't a great time to hunt down new customers. Anyhow, their tech support people seem inexperienced--XOHM is a new service, after all--but the wait times are short and they sound like they might really be in the Kansas City area as opposed to overseas.

As a loose end, part of why I was willing to go without a land line is that my current cell phone gets pretty good reception at my house. It's a Samsung m300, and really not a good phone (I've reviewed it at Amazon). But it's an upgrade over an Audiovox phone I had, much better than an LG piece-of-junk that I shipped back to Credo, and not really as good as the old Samsung phone I used with Verizon from '02-'06.