I fell quite by accident one day, into the curious world of Android tablets. Well, of course I knew many tablets other than the ubiquitous iPad existed, but didn’t expect so many of them to be Android based. Well there are, plenty in all shapes, sizes, brands and no-brands. If you look on eBay, you’ll find a lot of them for sale ranging from 7 inch to 10 inch screens. Some of the 7 inch models even sport a camera.
Well, I got my hands on a 10 inch model from someone who realized he’d bought the wrong item and wasn’t useful to him. The first few days of ownership, I almost felt a sinking sensation regret because it could literally do nothing without being able to access the Android market to download popular applications. I could however manually load them but the apps I wanted were almost exclusively available on Android Market so they were really hard to come by.
As I researched my options I also found a healthy and growing niche around Android tablets – there’s one for you Internet Marketers :). Turns out there are awesome forums online with super-smart people. With the help gleaned from these forums, I managed to upgrade the unit and make Android Market work. WOW what a difference. Once Market was on there everything changed and now, boy do I enjoy this thing.
I use it mostly to read books using the Kindle and Nook apps. I’m also very pleased to be able to watch videos on it. The quality is quite good – by my standards. This is important because these days it seems so much good content is either video or audio so it has really allowed me to catch up on some of the business podcasts and videos put out there – yes this includes videos in membership sites. This is one of the big reasons for having the tablet besides reading. I also loaded the WordPress for Android app but have yet to use it to blog yet.
And here’s the but. Don’t expect to do much business on this. Yeah you can update Twitter and Facebook etc and you can read or respond to emails but that’s as far as I’d go. I doubt I’d blog that much on it either although the option is nice. Also, it is NOT an iPad so you’ll need to calibrate your expectations accordingly. Namely the screen navigation takes some getting used to. You also have to be a little geeky and have the courage to ‘flash’ the unit to make it work well – in the beginning. It take some tinkering to get it to the sweet spot, a good match for someone who likes to get their hands dirty with technology.
Overall, I find this quite a useful tablet. It is light and easy to carry around at home or anywhere a busy parent and entrepreneur may need to go. The screen size is wonderful and suits my very specific needs perfectly.
