USB Keyboard on Vegan/G-Tablet

Yup, it works. Plug-n-play. Writing this using a USB keyboard I had laying around.

I switched to Vegan as TnT Lite was constantly hanging (some sort of notification issue?)

The Tablet Life - first few hours

I grabbed a Viewsonic G-Tablet today from Office Depot. Its a Tegra 2 Android Tablet with decent specs. I wanted to find out how viable it might be for day-to-day use, and to use as a development platform for my avionics software.

The first step was to put an unskinned Android on it. I randomly chose TnT Lite, as I couldn't quickly find a stable cyanogen 7 for it. This is pretty simple, a few reboots later, I had a 'fully functional' Android 2.2 environment. Market, Google Apps, and so on.

I can tell you right now that Docks or stands must be a hot seller for iPad owners and soon to be Xoom owners, as I wanted to prop this thing up practically every where I went. I think I'm gonna get some cardboard and an X-Acto knife to carve up a cheap stand.

The G-Tablet unfortunately has a low end notebook display on it. while it is 1200x600 resolution with decent enough colors/brightness, it falls down with anything other than a 'straight on' viewing angle. This shows itself mainly when watching video, as a shift in angle can increase contrast to the point where every compression artifact is magnified 100x, making the image look blocky. Reading black text on white background in Google Books or an RSS reader doesn't show this off as much. My HP TM2T also has this problem of really bad viewing angles, which was surprising, and its also a tablet, albeit a convertible.

The build quality seems decent enough, I don't see any gaps in the seams nor do I feel any flexing. It has a similar backing to what my EVO has, it doesn't have 'slippery bar of soap' feel like my old Palm Pre did. The tablet is about 1.5 pounds. Which is light compared to the TM2T at 4, but still 'too heavy'. I feel like a one hand grip may be too tenuous (or tiring) at times.

Touch response is top notch. Just like my EVO or any capacitive, I do end up with 'too light' of a touch at times, causing things not to register, but I have this same problem with every screen I've came across. Any time I do properly register a hit and receive feedback, the tablet is very prompt to respond. Note that this is all with a near 'stock' Android 2.2. running here. My very limited experience with the shipping viewsonic skin left me with feelings of revulsion. They do their customers a disservice by shipping such poorly performing and buggy software. The first time I booted resulted in every application (including Wi-fi or other settings) causing crashes. The performance in the viewsonic skin was right out of a memory starved Win95 machine from 1997. Switching to TnT cured every problem.

Once 'upgraded' to stock android 2.2 with all the google apps and what not, I could run though the old standbys to be treated to very smooth performance. Scrolling is smooth everywhere, (Gmail, Reader, Books, Web Browsers) Angry Birds works flawlessly, and video playback from the multiple sources I tried is stutter free. Google Maps 5.1 and its vector graphics are all here and running fine, though it the 3D buildings show up as solid, instead of 'ghostly'. Flash performance is decent, but not stellar. Video is ok, but many flash heavy sites are already at a disadvantage due to lack of mouse over.

I attempted to load marvel digital comics, (all flash), but the flash plugin died after it loaded the first page.

This comes to the next bit of quick impressions... The world isn't quite ready for tablets yet. Many sites just don't like them (prefer mouseovers and hovers), or have CPU crushing flash. In that regard, some of these sites even fall down on my PC. I'm not sure how iPadders cope. At least I can SEE the Flash controls and what not. The other side of this is the content providers themselves. I recently switched my AOPA magazine over to the 'digital' edition, which I attempted to read on the tablet. While this site is all HTML, its very quick and dirty. Its simply the pages of the paper magazine scanned and saved as images. I know this as the text refuses to scale well, and nothing is selectable. There are a few hyperlinks in the table of contents, but other than that its the same content as before.

The other big issue that I believe will keep coming up for me is the lack of content creation ability on these tablets. On my Win7 convertible, I have the pressure sensitive stylus and a full keyboard, which lets me create things quickly. Not only that, but I have compilers, IDEs and 3D editing packages and can install things like web or SQL servers. This is nearly impossible on 'pure' tablet form factors, even for something as open/flexible as android. Sure, there are a few finger painting apps, but a finger is not a good instrument for content creation. Typing long emails is also out of the question, although I do find the dictation decent enough and a bit of a time saver, as long as I speak one sentence at a time very clearly. I also can't see composing a webpage on these.

Where a tablet would seem to shine is a long plane trip, or a 'just got up in the morning and don't wanna get outta bet' sorta thing. Grab the tablet, its 'on' in 1 second, and start reading the mornings RSS feeds, or peeking at emails.

I'm spoiled, used to, and own other better displays, so for movie watching I'm more likely to fire up the desktop PC or the projector. Other than using this as a display in the plane, I'm not entirely convinced that any tablet (even the XOOM) really fits in in my life. I say this knowing that most people aren't me. In fact, most people would LOVE to 'ditch the PC' (or mac for that matter), and be able to get near instant access to content. Most people simply want to consume content such as video streams or read a book. It might be slightly more difficult for a heavy email user, but at least with the case of android, pairing a keyboard (or plugging one in if a USB host is available) is an option for those people.

I'll be trying out a few of these scenarios, perhaps even write my next Tablet Life blog post from the viewsonic.