Hi everybody,
If your one and only workstation is a 3~ kgs weighing laptop , you might want to consider buying a netbook for meetings etc.. As i’m currently a student and a freelance programmer , I’m facing lots of situations where i need to carry my laptop around. So i thought it would be a good idea to have a smaller laptop -a netbook- for portability purposes. Later on , with the uprise in the popularity of tablets , a new interest has flourished. And combining the need for a netbook and interest in tablet , i decided to buy a netvertible. After some research i found some fine and inexpensive options. At first i was thinking about buying an ASUS T101MT netvertible ( click for specs ) but it was to thick and bulky. There has been other options i have considered in the meanwhile , but to keep short , i will skip that part.
Then i found Acer Iconia W500 tablet. It has a dock-keyboard , comes with Windows 7 pre-installed , 2GB RAM , Multi-touch up to 4 fingers , 1280*800p , back & front camera etc. ( click for more of specs ) , it was perfect , exactly matching my needs. Beyond all that specs it is very portable.
I bought an Acer Iconia W500 last new year’s day. I have used it with its preinstalled O.S. – windows 7 – for first month. I was pretty happy with it. Acer had solved right-click problem on Windows pretty well. Double tapping with a secondary finger was registered as right click – one thing i’m missing now on Windows 8. On Windows 8 you have to keep your finger touching for a while to right click and it’s pretty annoying IMHO. That’s not only problem you will encounter after switching to Windows 8. W8 lacks a wireless manager , which means you will be unable delete a connection , create adhoc wireless hotspot , change settings of a connection etc.. Connectify doesn’t work… In short-term it boots up pretty fast but after you install a few software (VLC , Eclipse , Angry Birds , Windows Surface Touch Pack , World of Goo , Adobe Reader , WampServer , Notepad++ … that’s all i have now ) , it becomes extremely slow to boot up and sometimes gets stuck at logon screen. So it’s a develop-preview why i’m talking about all these problems i have faced. I’m telling these , because there are lots of people on discussion boards telling people that Windows 8 is totally usable on this tablet for daily usage. My effort here is only to balance that misinformation. Anyway , today i’m reinstalling Windows 7 after 2 months of use…I will miss only the responsive keyboard of Windows8 :/
So far we have talked about Windows 8… Lets talk about Android-x86. Because its development is non-profit and voluntary , i wont be commenting harshly. First of all i have to share my appreciation for their work on porting android to x86 devices.
Last week i updated to ICS-x86 amd brazos RC1 build. Even though it improved a lot , there are still some issues.
Here is a list of problems i have encountered:
- Screen flickers
- Accelerometer & Auto-rotation doesnt work
- Audio driver crashes and causes a disturbing audible noise , you cant stop by plugging headphone.
Other than these problems android runs pretty smooth with last release. But there is something i should notify you , you cant play any of those 3D fancy graphical games NFS Shift , GTA3 etc. , %99 of 3D games and apps doesnt work on android-x86 due to fact that those apps and games were compiled with ARM binary libraries. And when you discard those from market you are pretty much left with crappy apps , notetaking , todo , soundboard apps etc. pretty much like chrome webstore. So even though you install android-x86 i’m pretty sure you will stick with Windows.
thanks for reading
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