Showing items from tablets

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Asus ZenPad S 8 Review

After using an Nvidia Shield tablet for a year or so, and dealing with a battery recall and then an RMA because it would no longer hold a charge after only 3 months, I decided to try something different. The Shield is an impressive tablet, and the original version even more so. I would still recommend it for anyone who is serious about mobile gaming, but the average battery life and weight of the tablet itself made me want to find something more suited to my usage patterns. So I started looking…

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A Few Thoughts on Tablets

I’ve been through quite a few Android tablets since they first hit the market a few years back. I started with the incredibly well built T-Mobile branded Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. I actually still have this tablet and it still works. This particular tablet was during Samsung’s early days in the Android smartphone and tablet market. It is built like a tank, very solid construction despite it being plastic. Holding this device and then holding a new Samsung tablet makes the newer Samsung tablets feel very flimsy and fragile. Samsung’s choice of materials since they became popular has been one of the reasons I’ve shied away from them, that and their TouchWiz UI. which I’m not a fan at all. Luckily there are quite a few other tablets on the market to choose from, but how to choose from the many other options?

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Who Shall Control My Media? Part 3 - Media Players

Media players are a interesting topic.  Over the past couple of years, we’ve tried a variety of them.  The first one was back in 2007 and was the D-Link MediaLounge DSM-520 that got its media from a UPNP Media server.  It was designed to fit into a home entertainment unit, the typical ~19 inches wide and looked a lot like a DVD player or VCR.  At the time it was great.  There was no metadata, though, just a list of files. Select one and it usually played just fine.  It was a good product and nothing else even came close to it.

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Who shall control my media? Part 1

Over the last couple of years, the entire media landscape has changed. We were quite happy with MythTV, but its pretty limited in its scope, it can only handle TV, Recorded TV, Videos, Music and Pictures that are on its local drives. Now, add in the fact that we’ve had a Roku now for a while, as well as played with the Fire TV stick and set top box, and things get more messy. I’ve been exploring and trying out a bunch of different options, and have started to settle in on one.

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