I've intentionally avoided getting involved in the smart-phone/tablet mania of the last few years. In truth, I didn't see the need for one. My trusty old Dell laptop, over 10 years old now, can still handle anything I can throw at it - and no, I'm not a games-player, apart from the odd game of Mahjongg, so no state-of-the-art hardware needed here! Phone-wise, I still have an old Samsung SGH-D500 (original battery too) that is more than adequate of my humble needs.
But a Dragon x10 tablet owner I've become, for better or for worse. Being a hater of all things Microsoft, and a Linux-buff with 8 years experience using that OS, an Android-based tablet was always going to be my first and only choice - Android of course having derived from Linux.
First, a word about the hardware. The x10 sounds on paper a fairly impressive beast. ARM7-based, it features a 8-core CPU, clocked up to 2Ghz, a snappy GPU, 1Gig RAM and 16Gig internal memory, 5M-pixel/2M-pixel cameras, coupled with a wide-viewing-angle 10.6" screen - all for €130, available from Amazon Germany. Incidently, it is available marginally cheaper from Amazon UK - or would be, if they shipped to Ireland, which they don't - hence the German sourcing. Fuller details on the x10 are available here.
So yeah, for the price, it's a well-spec'ed piece of kit, and very snappy in use. It comes with a 7600mAh battery and claims some impressive run-times between charges - so I decided to do a quick test with a looped video. With a fully-charged battery and using MX-player with hardware-decoding enabled, I managed to get just short of 13.5 hours of continuous video playback from it - which I found kinda amazing! I should also add that that was with the minimum screen brightness, namely because that's the way I use it normally, but it also had both wireless & bluetooth enabled at the time, as I had forgotten to turn them off.
Firmware-wise, my x10 came with Android Kitkat 4.4.4. Amazon UK had claimed that Tablet Express (the x10 manufacturer) was selling them with the new & improved Lollipop 5.1 before I had ordered, so I was disappointed to discover mine was Kitkat-based when it arrived. Lollipop was available as a download from T.E though, so it was an opportunity to compare & contrast both systems. I played with Kitkat for about a month before upgrading to Lollipop.
Upgrading proved a real ordeal too! Although T.E don't make clear what Microsoft OS's are compatible with their upgrade software, as it looks like something that was produced for Windows 3.1 (so really bad) I presumed XP could easily handle it. No such luck! Try as I might, over the course of two days, XP resolutely refused to work with the upgrade-software. I eventually had to borrow a copy of Win7 and to temporarily install that, all just to upgrade the x10's firmware! It was also the first time that I had ever installed Windows 7 on a 'real' machine (I used it once with VirtualBox, but it had proven too slow) and must admit given my past recollections with Windows installations, this was a much improved experience.
Anyway, onto Android itself, and (imo) the whole setup's Achilles-heel. First, its good points. On the x10, most user-actions are super-slick. Obviously a lot of thought has gone into the user-interface. You also have more software available for it than you will ever get a chance to try - if you can ignore all of the ads! But given that I'm old-school (my first computer was a Sinclair Spectrum) and more interested in the implemention, and know from experience just how good Linux's multitasking capabilities are, I was surprised at the obviously poor job that Android does on this front! Given that there are 'proper' Linux distros that come on installations as small as 10Meg (Core Linux) I know that it doesn't take gobs & gobs of memory to create a 'proper' multitasking environment. This Android does not do! I was even more surprised to discover that earlier versions of Android had no multitasking capability at all! Rather than a System Monitor (or Task Manager in M$ parlance) where the user can monitor & interact with running processes, all Android has is the Back-button - and it is not at all clear what this does! Sometimes this will terminate an app, sometimes it will just send it to the background. A perfect example of this sloppy implementation involves the use of Browsers for surfing the net. Boot Firefox, open your favourite page, do some reading, hit the 'Recently used apps' button to start say Gmail, then head back to Firefox - what you find is that FF has been terminated, and is forced to reload its entire setup! This sloppy handling cannot be down to lack of memory - I have 1Gig after all!!!
It is hard to come to terms with this shoddy performance, especially given that Android is derived from Linux, which has being doing 'proper-multitasking' since forever! I can only surmise that Google has been putting all of its development effort into the GUI - but that still doesn't explain their not using already-existing technology! I have even read that Google/Android, rather cynically, terminate/reopen apps intentionally in order to generate more revenue from the ads having to be reloaded! If Google is following this route, then they will eventually end up getting their just desserts.
Long before Google even existed, Microsoft & Yahoo ruled. Yahoo in particular I remember as dominating cyber-space. And they really took the piss! I recall how Yahoo would lace their search-engine results with irrelevant links (mostly porn-related) and to hell with what the user was searching for. Along came Google, offering a really good search-engine with the minimum of unobstrusive ads - and they cleaned up! If they are now going to go and undo all of that good work by producing a half-arsed OS that intentionally starts/stops apps, just so they may generate a little more revenue, then they are idiots and deserve to be kicked off of their pedestal.
After the initial novelty of the tablet, I find myself going back to the laptop more & more. Sure, the tablet is handy, indespensible in some ways - I forgot to mention its bluetooth-headset music capability, which is superb, and its main-use here nowadays. But being somewhat of an OS-purist, imo, Android is a huge step-backwards as far as proper multitasking is concerned.
Edit:
A quick addendum. 3 - 4 months down the line, here are a few more thoughts on this purchase of mine. First off, one thing I didn't mention above, and something that has existed from the get-go, is that this x10 tablet suffers from a charging problem. The charger itself is your typical cheap-and-cheerful Chinese type, complementing the tablet perfectly. The problem is that when you plug it into the tablet's charge-socket, the tinest movement of the charger's lead will cause intermittent charging - I have often set it to charge overnight, only to find next day that no charging has taken place! Given that the charger-plug itself looks fine, I initially thought that it was a soldering dry-joint that was causing the problem. After carefully opening the tablet - no unscrewing necessary, it's of the 'clam-shell' variety - I am now (thankfully) again of the opinion that it is probably the charger-plug after all. Although a dab-hand with a soldering iron, given the component dimensions involved (sub-millimeter resistor/capacitor sizes, which is kinda scary!) I really didn't want to go messing in there. The circuit board is also tiny, especially considering the tablet's size - probably 100mm square all told. Thing about the charger is, it's a 'custom-type', with a teeny 2mm charging plug - so no place to buy another to see if that would fix things! Another charging-related problem is that occasionally when you plug in the charger, the tablet completely freezes. This is really disconcerting, as the only thing you can then do is hold down the power-off button and hope!
Regarding Android, one thing I've discovered is that despite all the 'anti-rooting' articles I've come across, after you use Android for a while, rooting is the only way to go! Two places where a rooted-device is essential, ad-removal and Bluetooth-GPS. Before I rooted my tablet, no matter what software I installed, I could not get my Bluetooth GPS-dongle to work with the tablet. Once rooted, things 'just work'! Same goes for ads-removal - internet browsing with an unrooted Android is generally a pain, often unusable. Once I installed 'Adaway' on my rooted device, browsing became a pleasure again. My opinion of Android itself has not improved one iota either. If only Unix/Linux could sue Google for bringing its superb multitasking capabilities into disrepute - seriously, it sucks!!!
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