So what devices have you always wanted to get but have never got round to buying, or just know you'd never use?
What handhelds have you always wanted to own but never have?
I was having an email discussion with Concretedog which started over his Jornada 720
, which is a great old handheld but one that I've never owned and if I did get one I probably never have time to use it. He then said that he had always wanted a Zaraus (I'd fancied one of those too), and also suggested a post on what handhelds you've always wanted to own.
So what devices have you always wanted to get but have never got round to buying, or just know you'd never use?
So what devices have you always wanted to get but have never got round to buying, or just know you'd never use?
The ones that Captain Kirk and his USS Enterprise merrymen used to own! ;) :D
ReplyDeleteI just got back from my local electronics store and I still find the Acer iconia tab to be pretty slick. It's only $279 and it had the best "feel" out of all the android tabs I tested.
ReplyDeleteI am not familiar enough with the ways of android though to count my vote as anything more then just random. But I did find the Acer was snappy and worked well when scrolling menus.
If I knew more about android and what it has to offer I might be tempted to buy. I am so in love with my apps and my iPad that idont know if it justifies a purchase though. I don't know if my iPad is not doing anything that an android tab could do for me.
I've only been bothered by lack of flash a handful of times so I'm not sure a $300 tablet to overcome that hurdle is absolutely necessary. But then when ever was a tablet a necessity :).
I always wanted a Sony vaio UX or any of the other smaller form factor umpc. I had a jujitsu lifebook umpc and it was good, but got really hot and the ergonomics were hard to use. I ended up selling it to get an iPad. Those 9" Sony widescreen vaios look nice too. I think it's called the "p" series. Sadly, no money for new toys right now.
ReplyDeleteI have a Zaurus (2 original developer ones) and they were great little machines with that pull-out keyboard thoughtfully designed for the Unix shell. Unfortunately that 200MHz FPU-less ARM was a bit underpowered for the music apps I really wanted to run on it (Csound!!!).
ReplyDeleteAlways wanted one of those Sony UX but picked up a Fujitsu Lifebook P1610 (pre-netbook tablet PC) and absolutely adore it. It's a Core Solo 1.6GHz so it's no scaled-down Intel Atom, and you can replace the CPU with a Core Duo (u7600 or u7700), which also allows installing 64bit operating systems. Touch-screen support is manageable on Linux but clumsy - works beautifully on Windows7 with Fujitsu's Vista drivers. On-board audio is Intel which is lousy for low-latency music apps but the PCMCIA slot enables using much better soundcards with ASIO support (I just use an Audigy2). The screen is brilliantly sharp in lowlight, a bit too reflective in daylight tho. Best of all, they're cheap on eBay ($150 or so) and high-capacity batteries (5-7hours) can be found for $25-$35, docking stations for $10, etc. It does use micro-dimm memory which can be relatively pricey if you need to buy it separately.
As much as I love all the iOS music apps I've accumulated, there just isn't anything comparable being able to sit back and toy around with Blue/Csound, Renoise or FL Studio.
I recently picked up one of those HP TouchPad and exploring SDK, I see a number of interesting libraries for handling audio including SDL, OpenAL, some Qualcomm-proprietary stuff for DSP programming. A 24bit/96khz Wolfson codec runs it's own DSP code (that so-called Beats Audio whatever that means). Both cores can be overclocked to 1.7Ghz which, with VFPV3 and NEON, makes this tablet a rather powerful music-making machine with the right tools.
newton
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