I had a chance to fool around with a Blackberry Playbook and a Samsung Galaxy Tab last week when the hubby and I were out and about. We were actually looking for a new computer chair for him; and ended up with one for me too I might add. I protested, but he insisted. <3

I had told him that I saw quite a nice layout at OfficeMax and OfficeDepot, but that I had preferred how OfficeMax displayed them. So we went to OfficeMax – and they had both tablets on display. We were waiting around for them to find our chairs in back, and I decided to play around with them a little bit – at least as long as I felt was decent without looking like I was trying to learn about every nook and cranny.

I have an iPad because I didn’t want to wait for the iPad2. I assumed (and rightly so) that the iPad2 had nothing over and above the 1 that I needed. So this “review” is going to be heavily subjective.

( Credit )

The Playbook

The rep who showed me the Playbook said while she was sure it wasn’t anywhere near the iPad in sophistication or reputation, the Playbook was one of her favourites.  It looks quite sleek. Smaller in size and lighter in weight than the iPad. The weight is a definite plus – the size is a bit much to get used to, though.  Of course, if you’ve had no experience with any tablets before, then you probably wouldn’t notice the differences as much as I did.

It is extremely light. It was tethered to the display case, so I couldn’t move around with it too much but it seemed manageable enough for one of my small hands.

I found it to be satisfyingly fast – I didn’t wait too much for a response from my swipes. However, I did spend a few minutes swiping and looking for a home button to click. It’s a good thing the rep was nearby because I would probably be there a lot longer trying to figure that part out. I am going to make a big leap here and assume that the Blackberry touch devices have the same interface. I’d like some feedback from someone who knows about this though – so please feel free to hit me up in the comments.

It’s a nice little tablet, but if you’re moving from the Android or iOS interface to the Playbook, you will find yourself swiping around trying to figure out the swipe directions and their meanings. If you are new to tablets, you’ll be fine. Just don’t try to get on an Android or iOS device too soon afterwards, though, because you will be in a similar situation to me, but from the opposite end of the camp.

The Galaxy Tab

I had to take a look because this one was actually labelled as the iPad killer at one time … which considering everything is a little ambitious. It’s Samsung’s first tablet and I can’t imagine that they would get everything right first try.

As with the Playbook, it is quite small and extremely light. I can hold it in one hand without too much effort. It is Android, so for those of you who have played with Android before now, nothing I say about the OS or its interface will be much of a surprise.

I tend to lean towards the Galaxy because of my own familiarity with the interface as it is extremely similar to iOS.

In terms of it’s responsiveness – it’s fairly fast. It could have been my imagination, but I think the Playbook was faster. While the rep and I talked over it (he is an Android man all the way, incidentally), I forked out my iPhone and we compared screen resolution and clarity, and from a layman’s perspective, while it isn’t at iPhone4 level, it really is quite good.

What’s my take on the 3 tablets?

I had always promised myself that my first tablet would be an Android one – I had even gone so far as to say that I’d probably wait for Google’s Chrome OS tablet. However, Google, as usual, is late getting to the point everyone else is already at and I didn’t feel confident in anybody else’s offerings at the time. The iPad size suits me and while the weight is horrendous and the fact that it has no ability to manage files the way we are all used to (directly from an explorer or finder point of view), and has a few more quirks that are annoying … I am quite satisfied with it.

Would I consider buying a Playbook? Probably not – and the only reason is because I am so used to a particular kind of interface – thanks to iOS and the iTouch that I had first, followed by an iPhone3, iPhone4 and now an iPad. If it weren’t for that, I might consider it a real option; despite the screen size.

Would I consider a Galaxy tab? Hell yea! They’d just have to make that screen a little larger and it would be pretty hard for me to resist selling the iPad and getting a Galaxy tab instead.

To both their credits, Samsung and RIM equipped their tablets with a camera first time out. I think Apple missed the boat on that one with their first iPad. And while I don’t personally need a camera on my iPad, I can see that would have been an even bigger selling point for Apple (debatable whether the iPad needs a bigger selling point, actually) had they been less dense about it.

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This is classic! Just classic!!!

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So I am sitting here, working on my iMac on the 25th of June. I had only JUST migrated all my work stuff back from the Macbook to the iMac since it is a much better machine to work on when I can. I was just getting back into the groove of working with a desktop instead of on a laptop perched on my knees. I was trying to figure out the best way to keep info sync’d between them both and was working on a plan when “poof” the iMac display just froze.

No application was responding, I couldn’t get the activity monitor open to see what was hogging resources, I couldn’t force quit anything … in fact, I could do absolutely nothing. Which reminded me of the early lockups I used to have when I first got the iMac … you remember those days, don’t you?

So, with a sigh, I turned the iMac off at the power button, waited a minute and fired it up again. While I waited, I booted my work stuff up on the Macbook to at least let my boss know I was not suddenly gone out of rudeness, but that I had a bonafide tech emergency on my hands. While I am typing to him, I hear the iMac making some funny sounds, and I turn to see this icon show up in the middle of the grey boot screen:

Thanks for the image, UrbanTornado – hope you don’t mind that i borrowed it.

While my own monitor isn’t that large, the question sign in all it’s stark horror was just as memorable. Oh how I cried and gnashed my teeth. Then I thought of what my good friend DJ would have told me “load up your disk utilities from your install disk”.

That exercise told me what I already knew – hard drive, well and truly trashed. It gave me some hope by telling me that while the disk wasn’t repairable or recoverable, that a reinstall and restore would probably fix the problem

I was jubilant and proceeded to do as advised.

Ha! What a load of BS! The install stalled (heh) after about 2 minutes in to tell me that OS X could not be installed on the chosen volume because it was irreparable damaged. Ok, ok – so it didn’t quite put it that way, but that was the end result. My hard disk was well and truly DONE.

I panicked first … then while I sat looking at the iMac I had added to my shopping cart at store.apple.com and wondering how I was going to finance this purchase, the panic drained away and I remembered what else my friend DJ and I had been talking about quite recently – a hard drive replacement for the iMac. At the time, the idea was to get a bigger drive to facilitate not only my too-large photo collection, but to also be able to bootcamp with a sizeable enough partition to make Windows gaming a possibility.

So off to ifixit.com I went.

The idea was to find a 500GB or so drive. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, the smallest drive I could get for my iMac off ifixit.com was a 1TB.

Tears gone, panic departed, exuberance ensued … until I found out that it was going to take at BEST a week for this new drive to get to me.

To cut this already too-long story short, even when the drive arrived, I couldn’t put it in because I didn’t have the right tools. Apple uses some very odd screws to fasten their stuff in so I had to order those and wait another couple of days. Fortuitously, the tools arrived on Saturday and I was able to take apart my iMac, replace the hard drive, reinstall the OS and restore my stuff to just about the point at which I lost it on the 25th …

It took me about an hour with the guide off ifixit.com – which was quite good considering it isn’t the correct guide for my model.

I even got it right the first time around. Which is especially gratifying for me being that this is the first time I’ve been inside a machine with the intent to replace stuff in about … ooo – 4 years?

What’s even better is the fact that I am now bootcamp’d … with still too much space to fill on my OS X partition.

I am a happy camper again.

What would make me happier still?

A new camera to take picts to fill that space up with.

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(This post was begun on June 25th – the day the hard drive in the iMac crashed. Forgive the late post.)

June 24th was release day for the iPhone 4G. I got all caught up in the feeding frenzy, attempted to pre-order and made plans to drive to Austin to “pick up my new phone”. I knew it was going to be crowded. I knew I’d be miserable for a few hours while I struggled with my crowd-phobia. But I figured the new phone on the first day was enough of a reward to actually try and do it.

And maybe just the excitement of driving myself to Austin solo was an overriding motivator.

A week beforehand, on the day I pre-ordered, I got the Magellan out of the Jeep and programmed in the address at “The Domain” in Austin and planned my morning out – I’d do the basic necessities for work and then hit the road about 10ish with the idea that I’d be out there until 3 at the latest at which time I’d come home and put in a couple more hours of work afterwards.

I know I was fooling myself about the putting in work while the new iPhone sat waiting to be played with, but I comforted myself with the idea that I was being responsible.

The drive to Austin was uneventful. I did really well for someone who hasn’t done a lot of driving on her own in the States. I didn’t cause any major highway mishaps or brake lockups and I didn’t get lost either. In fact, I drove right to the front door as if I had been there before.

I was quite pleased with myself …… until I saw the line:

… and was told that this was GOOD because at 7:30 the line extended around the block!

Well, to my credit I stood in that line (sometimes sitting on the sidewalk) until I had travelled about 1/4 of the way to the front of the line at which time the heat and humidity (and pants that don’t do well in the heat) made me decide that pre-order or no, I wasn’t going to site there until 7pm that night only to get a claim ticket to have to drive another hour back to Austin to pick up my phone before end of business on Saturday.

Got back into the a/c cooled Jeep and drove my ass home … and promptly fired up the apple website and ordered my iPhone 4 to be delivered to my door whenever.

I may be a big apple fan, but fangirl I ain’t. ugh.

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I had to find the exact quote and use it.

By far, XT-002 Deconstructor is possibly one of WoW’s most annoying boss fights ever (“NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!” in a high-pitched voiced, kiddie-tantrum fashion complete with pounding his fists into the floor) … but right here and right now, his first statement is so very apt.

I’ve got a couple new toys! I promise I won’t break them this time!

Well, one of them hasn’t arrived yet and I am going to have to wait until next week before I’ll see it. That would be the iPhone 4.  I tried pre-ordering for delivery, but it failed every time and I got impatient. Besides, I figure it’ll be nice to take a road trip down to Austin and pick it up … hopefully, I won’t get squashed in the store. Wish me luck?

In any case, I have abused my iPhone 3G pretty badly – moreso than any other phone I’ve had and I wonder what the deal is with that … how is it that the fanatically cautious fyrfli has been so careless? I tell myself I will be more careful this time and I probably will … the 3G has dropped far less in these last few months than it did in the first few months. That might have something to do with not putting it in my back pocket whilst I climb out of the Jeep anymore.

But today … WordPress 3.0 was unleashed. As of this writing, they number of downloads are still under 20,000 as per the download counter page.

I’ve had multiple requests to report whether there are any breaks and so I figured this was as good a time as any to post something and see whether anything has really broken. I guess we’ll see once I press the button.

So pretty … so shiny … pets new WordPress install …

On a serious note, the upgrade went flawlessly, I pushed the button in the admin panel and was done in minutes. Nothing was broken when I first reloaded the page, my theme has remained sound and all my plugins seem to still work well. So I am going to say that this has been a very successful upgrade.

I guess time will tell if those little tiny niggling things are still working too … you know, the ones that make you look back and say “I should have waited before I said I like it.”

~~~

In other news, took a little trip out to the local lake here … got a couple picts … G said it doesn’t feel like my usual shots and she’s right … either I am rusty, or I just dislike Texas so much that it’s coming out in the pictures … or … maybe it’s time for me to try something else? You tell me …

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