Android PC (Asus Eee Pad)

A recent (mid-2011) toy is a delightful little wireless Tablet PC running Android 4.0.3. Since the last mobile phone I bought¹ was in November 2007, for Christa to use in the hospice, I've not had any previous exposure² to Android but, on a 10" touchscreen, it's a delight.

Now that I've beefed up its external storage with a 1TB USB hard drive, the Tablet makes an excellent video jukebox. It has an hdmi output and I'm impressed by the quality of sound and video I've achieved after transcoding a few NTSC standard definition DVDs (on BlackBeast; not on the Tablet!) into MP4 files. It plays them back very nicely on my 60" Kuro plasma screen. It also brings me web and email access anywhere in the house, and burps discreetly at me whenever an email arrives. Although I prefer the printed page, it can also easily work as an e-book reader and if I plug in a set of headphones it makes a pretty decent MP3 player.

I've decided I am now seriously attached to it, emotionally if not physically. This after months, if not years, spent sneering at Junior's ever more sophisticated mobile phones. He currently uses an Android Google phone of some sort though he may well have bought himself an iPad2 by now, if I know my son.

Footnotes

¹  Actually, the only mobile phone I've ever bought, as I was previously dependent on Junior's discards.
²  Apart from a brief play with the "Shazam" app on Junior's phone while trying (successfully) to identify a sample of Ry Cooder music from an old radio recording.