, 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?
5 comments:
The ones that Captain Kirk and his USS Enterprise merrymen used to own! ;) :D
I 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.
I 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.
I 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!!!).
Always 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
Post a Comment