Julie’s Gadget Diary – 08-11-11

I thought I’d start up a new feature where I talk about the gadgets, gear and other ‘stuff’ I use on any random day. Think of it as a gadget diary of sorts… I probably won’t do a post every day (Ok, I know I won’t post one everyday), but I’ll do my best to do so on a regular basis. Especially if people like to read them 🙂 So without further ado… 08-11-11

Dear Gadget Diary,

I got up at 7:30am this morning to get ready for a 9am appt at the Cancer Center to see my oncologist. Jeanne didn’t go with me today, so I decided to take the Verizon Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 that I’m reviewing to keep me company while I waited the hour between my blood work and appt. I started out loading up the Waterfield Muzetto bag with the tablet, my Waterfield wallet and Droid X, but ended up swapping everything over to the Waterfield iPad Express Travel bag. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 fits perfectly in it.

After I had my blood drawn, I went back to the waiting area and pulled out the tablet to check for emails that had come in over night. Although the hospital has free wifi, I used the built in 3G (it’s actually the LTE 4G tablet – but we don’t have 4G in Columbus…) for data access. It worked really well with only a few slow downs here and there. The only ‘problem’ I noticed was that sometimes it would take awhile for my email to catch up with me after I’d deleted several messages, they would still be in the inbox.

One of the nurses happened to see me using the tablet and got all excited saying she wanted one. When she later came back out to take me to the exam room, she asked me to give her a demo. One of the things she really wanted was Netflix on the tab and unfortunately, it’s not available yet… But I did show her YouTube. She immediately did a search on “cpl John C Bishop” and showed me videos of her son who was killed in Afghanistan last year. It gave me goosebumps.

After she left the room, it wasn’t but 5 or so minutes later that another nurse came in and asked for a demo too. She had just bought an iPad for her brother (I think) and was asking questions about how to get pictures from a camera into the iPad. I told her about the special adapter that Apple sells and she asked me which one I liked better, the iPad or the Samsung Tablet. I told her I wish I could take the features from both and make one tablet. 🙂

After my doctor appt, I went to Jiffy Lube to get my oil changed and was able to pull out the tablet again to do some ‘work’ while I waited. Yay built in 3G! No demos this time around though… I noticed some things about Android browser in the tab that can be slightly annoying. The two main problems are something specific to blogging with wordpress, so most people won’t care.

1. When reading my RSS feeds through google reader via the browser, the list of items has weird graphical artifacts.
2. Using the browser to access the WordPress admin page for The Gadgeteer has some issues too. Links to approve comments don’t automatically show up. I have to click on the area near the comment to get them to display. A couple of times I ended up hitting an invisible link to trash the comment. Argh.
3. I found that you can’t upload images into a wordpress article from the gallery on the tablet using the stock browser. I had to use the actual wordpress app to do it which I guess isn’t a big deal, but I’d rather just use the browser.

After I got my oil changed, I ran over to Joann Fabrics store across the street to kill some time and ended up buying some plastic canvas rectangles for a project I want to try to do. I have had it in my head to create a modular wallet system for years and years. I’m going to see if I can prototype it with the plastic canvas… It will probably end up looking really goofy, but that’s ok.

Not long after I returned home, the Fedex truck showed up with a used Verizon iPhone 4 that I ordered yesterday. It’s my 3rd try at getting one, so hopefully this one will activate. I’ve been wanting to switch back for awhile now, so we’ll see what happens. I’m thinking of trying iOS 5 on it too. Maybe…

Thoughts for today:

I’m liking the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 a lot. Having the built in 3G / 4G is really handy. But, in a perfect world, I’d take the iPad 2, and give it Flash, dashboard widgets, an SD card slot and the ability to pair a Bluetooth keyboard & mouse.

Demoing the Samsung to the people at the cancer center was a lot of fun. I’ll take my iPad 2 with me next Thursday when I have my day long chemo treatment and see if anyone notices 😉