BSD & Gaming

Christmas came early this year for me thanks to the generosity of my family. They know I haven’t had the cash to splurge on any new tech stuff in ages and I’ve been daydreaming about a new PDA or Tablet PC for a while. I just had to decide what I wanted.

I knew I didn’t want to spend the insane dollars required just to get an iPad with very limited features. In my mind things like USB ports, built in WiFi, and flash card readers should always be included as standard fare. Neither should getting any of those items be an excuse for sellers to donkey punch your wallet and suck higher fees out of you….  No thanks Apple you lost my interest with that business model!

Being old school some facts didn’t really sink in till I started researching my choices, I found that the days of stand alone PDA designs are long over, they’ve all been incorporated into cell phones.  Bleh! No more cell phones, they oughta’ be outlawed! Get off my lawn ya dam punks!

While netbooks are appealing, actually using the super tiny keyboards and looking at the small screens for any length of time lost my interest. Ah well, crosses netbooks off the selection list. Given my idiosyncratic preferences the choices are down to some sort of a tablet and picking what operating system I wanted.

Apple’s OS is definitely out since as I already stated I have zero interest in the whole iPad boondoggle. I also tend to stay as far away from Windows as I can. That left the final contender being an ANDROID based device.

Once I decided on a DROID based tablet I spent a many hours, days actually, looking at options, system specs, etc.  I kept getting drawn to the Zenithink tablets despite a few complaints I found, which included a particularly snarky magazine article deriding them. The article was dismissive of the ZT-180 because it wasn’t the omnipotent Apple-Killer they wanted it to be. While I can see their disappointment over not having a rival to flaunt at Apple, I couldn’t agree with their conclusions at all since they based them on silly expectations.  In my view if you take the ZT-180 for what it is and what it offers in it’s price range, then it makes a very nice choice with a broad range of abilities compared to some competitors.

Pricing from stateside dealers ran anywhere from fifty to eighty dollars more than dealers outside the U.S. so I ordered one from over-seas instead. Delivery took less than ten days to arrive from time of order. I’ve had it for almost two weeks now and it’s been a heck of a lot of fun to mess around with. Once I’ve had more time to kick it around and mod it to my preferences I’ll write up the details.

In conclusion Santa was very good to me this year and I’m really pleased!!  ANDROID ROCKS!

ZT-180 Wiki page from SlateDroid

I’m sure the MacZombies will be running out and snapping up the new iPads as soon as they can. I don’t want to sound super critical of Apple or their products, but once you look at what it offers my reaction is definitely apathetic. Again, no offense but once I looked into the details my first thought is “Mehhh.. whatever.”

According to the reviews and product specs, at the starting price of $499 you get 16gb storage, a 9.7 inch screen and a non-multi tasking OS.Basically what you do get is a large screened iPhone that is not a phone. Apparantly it does not include a standard usb port, does not include wifi or 3g access, does not have a flash card slot, the web browser cannot view Flash media, etc etc etc. Those items cost a boatload more cash or are not available at all.

While it does purportedly have an impressive 10 hour battery, a slim profile, and the usual slick apple product styling, over all it’s just not worth it for the money to my way of thinking…  not for me anyway. I’d be a lot happier with a $399 netbook of similar screen size and profile that I could load my own OS onto [ PC-BSD or FreeBSD ] and have memory card slots, usb ports, wifi capability, etc etc for a LOT less cash.