Quitbit Wristband: You Die Now.
Someone in Startup Land is now thinking, “Hmmmm, how can we do this? Imagine how much money insurance companies will pay to make their customers wear this!”
2015/09/13
2015/09/09
Insignia Flex Elite 7.85: Standby Battery Drain
Insignia Flex Elite 7.85: Standby Battery Drain
Over at XDA Developers, FreeTim said:
It’s fast and snappy. Display is crisp & nice and bright and is the perfect size. I too am seeing unexpected battery drain overnight (losing 50% of battery) while the tablet is sleeping. I wish the battery lasted longer on standby as my needs are to read to fall asleep and then wake up and study – the Tab A has a longer lasting battery than this. Takes a long time to boot up if it’s entirely shut down. It refuses to run Netflix either in the Netflix app nor in the browser. I have all the latest updates of the OS plus Netflix but it’s not working. It’s a shame but I am today returning it to BestBuy due to the Netflix issue which I consider a core app. WINS: Display is awesome and CPU speed is very good! CONS: Won’t play Netflix, battery life is weak, takes long to boot up.
I’m not surprised. There has to be some phone bits inside the Rockchip — or Lightcomm, or Five Technology — Android that haven’t been taken out. This has been the cause of standby battery drain from other China-originated tablets too. The phone bits keep searching for a signal, I think. Then again, given the borkiness of the update checking, it could be the damn tablet is constantly phoning home to see if an update is available. I wonder if going into Airplane Mode — turning off all of the radios — would improve things?
Over at the Best Buy listing, the same FreeTim (as TimFree) also wrote:
If I use right after charging it’s fine for a few hours so for commuting or using on airplane or around the office it’s fine. I wish it offered an ultra-power-saving mode (black/white screen etc) like the competitors do, for the rare case when I’m stuck in airport for a long time.The Netflix app for some reason does not work at all after the main menu, it just says, “Loading” when you try to play any title (works fine on my other devices.) I have the latest O/S as of this writing and the most updated Netflix app. This is the sort of thing that we hope the developers at Insignia will fix with a software update in the near future, we’ll see.If I shut it down (instead of sleep) it takes longer than my Macbook air to boot up. If you most often ‘sleep’ and not power-off completely this is not any issue, but it consumes battery in ‘sleep’ mode.OVERALL YES I DO LIKE IT – It is very snappy fast CPU touch screen and response, faster than my phone and pictures come out great. I have added a 32GB memory card and it is working fine. The 7.8 inch screen size is perfect for me – Kindle reading or language learning I use Busuu app, not too small to read and it is the right size to use while commuting on a bus. Very bright and can be viewed from any angle. I reduce brightness to save battery or use the auto-brightness setting.I use a Logitech bluetooth headphone set H800 and it works fine for me!I installed:
Evernote, Busuu language learning, Kindle, Mint, AngryBirds, Minions games, they all work fine!While I like it overall, Netflix not working is a huge blocker I won’t recommend this to a friend, unless a patch comes out to fix it. I consider NetFlix to be a core app.
Also at the listing, a second customer has mentioned YouTube being out of sync:
I was totally excited to find a tablet with such a high resolution screen at a nice price. Its the perfect size for reading, surfing the web, all that good stuff. However, I’m not able to watch YouTube videos. The video does not sync correctly with the sound or vice versa. I tried about 20 videos and every single time the sound did not sync. it was totally frustrating I was hoping I could use this tablet on vacation while lounging at the beach at the pool but I find myself turning it off a lot just to preserve the battery.Note to Best Buy- YouTube is the number 2 ranked search result in Google. How did you release this without testing it? Is there going to be a fix for YouTube? Another reviewer was having issues with Netflix will that be fixed?*If these two issues were fixed this would be 5 stars for sure.I just want to add that the BestBuy Sales Rep was totally nice and assisted me right away as they always do.
I have to admit, I didn’t try more than one YouTube video in my testing. It looked to play just fine. I’ll have to try others, I guess.
But another customer, in an earlier review, found a fix for YouTube:
YouTube had a severe syncing issue with video and audio. I went into developer mode and disabled the beta media player and it seems to have fixed that issue.
Over at Yahoo Answers, I did my bit.
Insignia flex elite cannot read files?My insignia flex elite android tablet won’t or can’t read files from the SD card I put in it. It only goes as far as to show the file on the screen whether it is a PDF file or text or jpeg. But I need to open text files or word documents to edit them but the tablet only says “can’t read file”I tried downloading all kinds of apps to read and/or open the various files but the apps won’t open the documents and files I have on the SD card. Help!!
I replied:
Try formatting the card as NTFS.
And cited the XDA Developers post.
I think the same guy is also looking for a good notepad-like app: What’s a good notepad app for android?
I’d like to see recommendations for that too. I otherwise have no answer.
There’s no other new posts at XDA. And nothing new at ARCTablet forum, either.
Which is unfortunate. If OMA’s firmware could be flashed to it, I think we’d see an improvement in battery life and probably more too. What potential is being wasted!
Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 Super AMOLED Annoys Me
Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 Super AMOLED Annoys Me
I’ve tried the new Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 a few times now and there’s an issue with the screen I just can’t tolerate.
I mentioned it in an earlier post:
The Super AMOLED screen is killer. But I have to point out that when viewed at a sharp angle, whites tend to become bluish.
Well, it’s not just at sharp angles that pure white begins to have a blue tint!
I noticed this during another fondle of the Nook edition of the tablet. I downloaded a sample of an eBook. That gave me a pure white background for reading. And if I wasn’t just about perfectly head-on to the display with my eyes, it would shift to an increasingly-blue color.
Maybe most people can live with that, but it irritates the hell out of me.
The Insignia Flex Elite 7.85 is less than half the price of Samsung, but white stays white regardless of the viewing angle.
I was warned about the Samsung screen in earlier Comments.
John:
According to Wikipedia these tablets have pentile displays. I absolutely despise pentile displays, so these two are dead to me. Shame, they do look nice.
Filipp:
Hm I am sure they have their awful PenTile display there. That means that it is not actually retina screen as it is much less sharp. And it will cost up to 3 times more than standard retina chinese tablets.
Doing a quick Google brought up this: I am officially done with HD Super AMOLED displays.
And in that he raises an issue I hadn’t even considered nor tried: The appearance of the screen with reduced backlighting. According to him — and his illustrations prove it — the screen will look like low-resolution crap.
I also found this post: Galaxy S4 vs HTC One – Display Comparison.
And here’s a photo that explains a little of the screen issue:
Samsung, on the left. That blue!! It’s even worse on the Galaxy Tab S2 8.0.
Since reading will be the primary use for my tablet, I’m not sure I can live with the blue-shifting of the Samsung.
I’m beginning to consider just saying the hell with it all and getting the iPad Mini 4 — it has the monstrous power of the iPad Air 2. I wouldn’t have the microSD card slot I need, so I’d have to investigate offline storage via Bluetooth or WiFi.
Or I can also say the hell with it and go for the cheap-ass Insignia Flex Elite 7.85 with its regrettable battery life.
Or maybe the mythical Nexus 8 from Colorfly and Google will happen after all. But would it have a microSD card slot? Nexus branded devices tend not to.
I haven’t made any final decision yet, but since others sometimes read these posts for their own buying decisions, I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention.
Same-day update: It turns out the new Mini 4 does not have the guts of the iPad Air 2. It’ll use the A8 CPU, not the A8x CPU of the Air 2. Which means I’ll have to go through an entire new round of Google Books PDF tests on the beast.
2015/09/07
Onkyo scores first properly wireless Bluetooth earphones with W800BT model
When wireless earphones started appearing it took a while to get over the jarring feeling that the connecting wire didn’t actually make them what we wanted them to be.
Now we’ve all got used to wireless earphones having at least one wire, Onkyo’s come along and announced the first properly wireless set of earphones – the Bluetooth W800BT.
These earphones work independently and the right earbud carries a mic for calls.
These earphones work independently and the right earbud carries a mic for calls.
They come with a USB charging case with a built-in battery and offer 12 hours playback.
Sound is blasted through Ø8.6mm neodymium drivers with a with a range of 20Hz-20kHz and a sensitivity of 100dB.
They will be out in Europe in November and will cost €300 (US$335).
Now comes a new peril… the terror of losing just one earbud.
Elephone M2 images and specifications surface
Last month were reported that Elephone plans to launch business M series of smartphones, and brought you the images and specifications of the Elephone M1. Today we managed to get hold of images and specifications of the Elephone M2 smartphone that will have a metal unibody design and 7.35mm thickness. It is also said to come with a fingerprint sensor. The design of the M2 is similar to the M1.
The Elephone M2 will come with a 5.5-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) display, will be powered by an octa-core MediaTek MT6753 processor clocked at 1.5GHz with Mali-T720 GPU, pack 3GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage with expansion slot, run on Android 5.1 (Lollipop) OS, come with a 13MP auto focus camera with LED Flash, Sony IMX214 sensor, f/2.2 aperture, 5MP front-facing camera with f/2.2 aperture, 4G LTE support and a 2500mAh built-in battery.
The Elephone M2 will come in Gold and Black colors. There’s no word on the pricing just yet, but we will know more about it when the smartphone goes official.
Let’s Compare iPad Mini And Clones Weights
Let’s Compare iPad Mini And Clones Weights
In my time holding the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 Nook Edition at Barnes & Noble, I realized that I’d be holding one of these tablets for a lonnnng time while reading.
So I thought I’d investigate weight.
These weights are for WiFi-only versions, except for the Archos Diamond Tab which has 3/4G included by default:
How low will the upcoming “iPad Mini Air” go in terms of weight?
How soon before an iPad Mini-sized tablet is the weight of a Kindle?
And can a Kindle get lighter?
Note that the iPhone 6 Plus weighs less than a Kindle Voyage: 6.07 ounces (172 grams).
As a point of comparison, Don Linn kindly weighed a fat mass-market paperback for me, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (what he had handy). It’s 0.8 pounds. That’s 12.80 ounces.
So tablets are already below the range of fat paperbacks I’ve read in the past, such as Dune and Atlas Shrugged.
How long before they’re as light as an Og Mandino mass-market paperback? Amazon lists The Greatest Secret in the World with a shipping weight of 2.40 ounces (68 grams). That’s still lighter than a Kindle.
In my research, I found it odd that there’s no chart showing the weights of mass-market paperbacks. Seems someone somewhere slipped up in Marketing.
Created in 2007, a bit dated, and this version of the video with subtitles begins after about a minute of dark screen (fast forward):
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