BSD & Gaming

I’m enjoying my android tablet and having fun finding great applications for it. With the 10.2″ screen I keep a lot of photos on it but have had problems with the preloaded image viewers. The default picture viewing application blows chunks in the worst way, frequently crashing and intermittently unable to view new additions to the galleries because of buggy image caching. Forget about using it to set new desktop wallpaper, it forces you to crop the chosen image size down and limits it to a low resolution version.

I’ve tried a ton of picture viewers from the market and other sources, nothing works the way I wanted them to and until now none solved the bad wallpaper dilemma. However I finally found a program called “JustPictures!” and it is the best I have found so far. JustPictures! offers some useful features like choosing what folders to use and how to display images. Most importantly it also lets you apply a larger sized high res image for the desktop. Give it a try, JustPictures! is free and definitely better than the stock application.

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