What to do about my broken Android tablet (poll)
Martin_H
Posts: 4,051
On 05/17/12 I bought a refurbished Acer A100 for $179 after dropping my eLocity A7 which was itself a year old and also a refurb for $190. Last night I dropped my A100 and the screen has spider web cracks all through it. The tablet still works, although in some ways it would be easier if it broke completely. Now I need to think about what to do next. My choices are:
Do nothing and accept this as evidence I cant have nice things. It works and this will remind you to be more careful in the future.
Buy replacement front glass ($40) for the A100, download the free service manual, and spend an hour or so installing it.
Accept that one year is the MTBF and buy a Nexus 7 for $200. Except for lacking a uSD card slot and rear camera, its much better than the Acer A100 or the A7 anyway as it has a Tegra 3 and better resolution screen.
Martin
Do nothing and accept this as evidence I cant have nice things. It works and this will remind you to be more careful in the future.
Buy replacement front glass ($40) for the A100, download the free service manual, and spend an hour or so installing it.
Accept that one year is the MTBF and buy a Nexus 7 for $200. Except for lacking a uSD card slot and rear camera, its much better than the Acer A100 or the A7 anyway as it has a Tegra 3 and better resolution screen.
Martin
Comments
If you liked the tablet and it met your needs and you are up to the repairs, #2 sounds reasonable. Maybe #2, gift it to an offspring in a few months and then execute the current option for #3.
I am annoyed that these guys are forcing the end of netbooks that have sold for less, and actually offer a better form factor for durable mobile computing.
Consider it a rectangular frisbee and get a good netbook with Linux.
http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/05/15/VIDEO-Man-destroys-Maserati-over-poor-repair-service/6811368646693/
One of my co-workers suggested I add an option to the poll "Buy a real computer", but he doesn't like anything non-Windows.
I just can't understand why anyone would buy a Maserati or a Lamborgini from an unreliable dealer. Both have been demolished in protests by owners in China. I wonder who they think they are punishing, or what they really might achieve.
I had an uncle that bought a Rolls Royce from British Motors of San Francisco (never ever buy a car that is serviced by them), and after he and his lawyers had swapped it twice (yes he went through 3 Rolls Royces) and never got one to run right, he just went back to Cadillacs.
If I had his money, I'd burn all mine and live happily ever after.
I'm glad I didn't jump on the $30 WinCE netbook bandwagon. Over in the other thread they sound a bit of a pain.
If you don't really like it enough to fix, the nexus 10 is really nice. At $400, you won't be dropping that.
For a PDA, I started out with a $500USD Sony CLIE that feel off a table within 30 days of purchase and the screen was gone.
To make matters worse, Sony refused to repair it because I was in Taiwan and it was made for US and Japanese markets only.
Screens and keyboards are still high wear items.. replacement should be a reasonable customer service.
A coworkers iPhone on the other hand is pampered and treated with kid gloves. The screen glass cracked right down the middle spontaneously as he was looking at it.
It would be helpful if product reviewers would try and break things a bit more. We need a "Jeremy Clarkson" of mobile computing.
Ray
Have you considered target practice?
So accept a limited lifetime (some owners experience shorter lifetimes than others), replace it with the latest and greatest you can get and like, and then......... PART THE DEAD ONE OUT FOR COOL PROP PROJECTS!!!!!!!!!
No frikkin way. Sounds like you are suggesting we be prepared to throw away $1500 every year on some computing trinket. That's to rich for me.
If they are paying for that BYOD, i.e. they buy you the tools they hired you to do work with. Then OK. Who cares what it costs. That is for them to worry about.
But, if you are subsidizing your employer that sounds like a really bad deal. Yep, except in my experience so far there is nothing in a dead smart phone or tablet that is actually repurposable (is that a word?) in any easy way. Except possibly the SD card if it has one.
Two votes for "Do nothing and accept this as evidence I cant have nice things."
Three votes for "Buy replacement front glass ($40) for the A100".
Seven votes for "Buy a Nexus 7 for $200."
One write in for "Buy a real computer."
One write in for "Wait for the next round of Windows 8 tablets."
I've read that a new Nexus 7 is coming out in July, so they are expecting a price drop on the current Nexus 7 before then. Since the current tablet is usable I plan to hold out for the price drop and buy the 32 GB Nexus 7 next month. Given that I use the tablet every day it cost me less than $0.50 per day so that is less than coffee.
The good for a year or so was referring to the kindles/nexus/androids low enders. I had actually expected my BBPB to last longer, but as I got it for the $199.00 clear out price on 64GB units I did not get an extended warranty, my bad as it made it to 1year and 4 months before the UI started to flake out. But the devices in this price range really do seem like throw aways just due to the rapid rate of change in the technology.
I did not lightly go into the surface pro, nor with the intent to give my employer a freebe. After figuring all sides, from a feature point, the first choice would have been the nexus 10; IF it could talk to a USB 2/3 device, had the ability to run USB to serial converter and other things I do for both work and play. Many locked down ultrasound systems will give up appropriate diagnostic info if you have a serial terminal and the means to coax them into cooperation. Pads are nice to be able to just go into the field and use with devices such as MCU driven systems or projects I like playing with on my own time. The nexus 10 may have given me most of that. but too many sites that I use on a regular basis all seem to be hostile in some minimal to major way to anything not compatible with IE7 or less. (Still have to tell ie10 to play stupid with these sites to work well, but I can) The surface took care of that. The surface had USB3.0 Big difference when carrying @#$@loads of service data etc on a USB3.0 external drive. But bottom line is that I can do anything on this that I can at my laptop or home unit. I am just not willing to lug my laptop all over the place and wait for it to be ready when I am ready to move on to the next call. That puts me way behind the 8 ball by the end of the day and it can have a bad ripple through on a busy week.
So what I really wanted was something that would let me do anything I wanted it to do like running proptool, Simple IDE, netflix and other fun stuff, be compatible to work and enable me to keep on top of some work things. In other words Did it for me and no one else. I am compensated well enough to be able to do this. and believe me when I tell you, it is a big help for one with ADD. It is all about my own convenience and wants. Also, I doubt there will ever be a BST for android, have not seen plans for Simple IDE that way either. Seems that everything I want to play with is either windows or Linux, this will do both, either with Hypervisor or possibly directly though while I have seen the how-to on it, not yet tried it.
Dead unit parts? SMT stuff, displays? Don't know, BBPB still limping along, still has important data, can't kill it yet to find out.......
I still want to update my home desktop, but that will be a while before the controller approves that one. She, I am sure, has other plans........
Sorry about the ramble, combination of things and distractions......
Frank
Good grief, I (my OS/2 system was only displaced by Linux) could never have imagined sitting here today defending myself for actually liking a microsoft system.......What is this world coming to.........