Frugal Propellerhead Goes to Disney World

So; at long last; the Frugal Propellerhead meets the Disney Experience.... Oh, I don't mean the go to Disneyland for the day type of experience. That's more like a really, nicely done Six Flags. Nooooo..... I mean the full blown go to Disney World for a week immersion! It's no secret among my friends that I've never been a Disney kind of a guy. In fact, I'm famously anti-Disney. Just not a big believer in the sugar-coated perfect world structured for the upper-middle-class. Don't believe me? Go there and watch the people (and their behaviors), then compare that to the your last trip to the various Six Flags of the world. See..... But no, this is not a post on the sociological aspects of modern America and Disney's role in it, it's a post about our trip and how technology was part of it, as is the purpose of this Blog.

So how does anyone (much less a Propellerhead) deal with this? 

 

It starts with these two indispensible items. Your Magicband from Disney and your smartphone. Android, IOS doesn't matter. Getting the Disney experience App does. If you are planning on getting the full experience of several days and stay "on property" (more on this later), the Magicband is pretty much mandatory.

Yeah, that's what all it does. It completely eliminates the need to carry a wallet...... plus it tracks everything you do (as well as facilitate it) for Disney. So, it's not for the paranoid amongst you. But frankly, it's a bit of genius and works well. My personal favorite thing about it? It's your room key so you don't have to make sure to give the kids "the card" when they come and go! If you stay at one of the Disney properties, it really is like a magic key that does everything. And if you intend on doing the multiple day thing, I'd highly recommend staying "on property" and taking full advantage of all the Disney conveniences such as the transportation, food service (which was very good), and even little things such as having your purchases sent to your resort for pick up. Loved it! 

As far as the App goes, it allows you to manage your experience the whole time....in real time! Meaning you can see when your next appointment is that you have booked a "FastPass" time, where it's located, while helping you find it through the map function using GPS. My wife, who's the planner, kept her App (and us) going all the time! You can even manage your eating reservations on it as well (also, more on that later). The downside of course that all you who've used Smartphone apps that are GPS intensive is that it eats battery charge like nobody's business!

Which leads to this thing..... What is it? It's what they are calling, a "power station" these days, and this one is the EC Technologies 2nd Gen Deluxe 22400mAh Ultra High Capacity "Power Station". It'd highly recommend it. Why?

If you can extrapolate by comparing it to either the iPad or the coffee cup; you can see that it's huge! Why this monstrocity!?! Well.... the 22400mAh requires no explanation. For a "power station" that number is huge (and apparently accurate) as well. We were able to use it virtually the entire week mostly recharging my wife's phone (and occasionally mine as well) without having to recharge it at all. The thing finally gave out the last 2 days of the trip. Oh yeah; it's CHEAP!!! $36.99 from Amazon. How is it so cheap? It has very few features on it at all, just the USB ports, charge indicator lights and a flashlight LED, plus it's not a well know company. I did do my research before buying it of course, and the reviews are excellent across the board. One reviewer even took it apart and found that it used top notch batteries and commented that it was cheap enough to even consider buying to take the individual cells out, but was too useful to do so! One caveate though; it's big and kinda heavy. So if you aren't carrying a decent sized pack (I was), then it will weigh you down with it's 15.36 oz weight!

 

If there were anything else that was indispensible, it was these 2 items. The top of course, was my ThinkPad X1 which happily greeted me at the beginning and end of each day. I used it for the normal stuff in the few minutes I had at thoses times and not much more needs to be said about it since I've written on it in past posts. The other item, I've touched on a little previously, but not in detail, so I'll talk more about it here. It's my Lenovo F-800 "Multi-Mode" Drive. Here's what it does: it's a 1Tb USB 3.0 external drive, WiFi access point (via the Ethernet port), WiFi streaming device (of media files stored in it's shared folder) either to computers logged on to it or Smartphones/Tablets running it's App.....oh yeah, it is also self-powered with it's internal battery as well as able to charge other devices as a charge station! We used almost all of those functions! On the roughly day and a half car trip, it served up movies to the children via their iPads in the back seat. No more cords! At Disney, I used it as a "dump station" for when I filled up the camera's memory cards (I carried 5). In some of the hotels, we used it as an Internet access point if the WiFi signal wasn't very strong. It's been so useful, it has replaced the HooToo Tripmate Nano which requires external power and found a permanent place in my technology bag! It's list price is $250, but I got mine on "special" directly from Lenovo for $100.

 

There was one other little thing..... we drove the hour or so East to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy Space Center. Let's just say that it was amazing and for someone like me (born in 1960) it fulfills one of my "bucket-list" items. The Atlantis exhibit was most impressive and brought back memories of the Challenger and Columbia which made me emotional.

Is there more to say? You bet, but that needs to be in another post where I'll discuss the various issues of photographing the Disney vacation!

iPads Are of the Devil!

There it is, the baaaad beasty! Just look at it! What harm could it be, I asked myself? Just one little iPad for my wife so she could test classroom kid apps on iOS against the Android. We were an Android house with 4 Android tablets running variously "Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich". 

Then this happened. I got a great deal from a co-worker upgrading and asked my wife if she wanted it. "Sure", she said "What could it hurt"? Then she decided that iOS was more kid-centric on educational apps. And of course (as you know), iPad 1s can't be upgraded beyond iOS 5. 

You can predict what happened next right? This right here, of course! We bought a "2" (got a great deal by the way), and the original became Katie's, but mom wasn't terribly pleased because it wouldn't run the same apps. What to do?

This happened of course! Apparently, any idiot knows you don't let 2 iPads into your house....except me of obviously! So, we sell the offending iPad 1, and put the money into a partial payment for the.......

iPad Air for my wife, who then passes the iPad 2 down to Katie. Now you figure, we were finished right? Ohhhh, Nooooo! Now we had an issue of the one child using the iPad and the other who didn't have the same apps to work on. You try having an 8 year old girl share "her iPad" with her 11-year old brother!

That's when this happened! Within a short amount of time, we got Josh a Mini for his birthday, then later in the summer, decided that we were better off with both kids on Minis instead of Katie trying to tote around the much bigger "2", which became the wife's "school" iPad to use in the classroom as she moved to a Mac-centric district. 

In my mind's eye; it was this..... or this!!!

The effect was this! It was now the end of the summer and the school year was looming. I was tasked with the job of selling off the 9 old laptops that the wife had used in her classroom. I started selling old ThinkPads one after another and putting away the money. I won't regale you with the detaileds, but when the dust settled and it was "said and done" a week ago. We had as follows:

• 1 iPad Air 32Gb- Momma's personal property "NO TRESPASSING" by commoners
• 2 iPad 2s 16Gb/1 iPad Mini- Classroom iPads for working in "stations"
• 1 iPad 2 16Gb- Provided by her district for the teacher and used in her "stations"
• 1 iPad Mini Retina 16Gb- Katie's (she of the bad eyes) tablet
• 1 iPad Mini 16Gb- Josh's (he of the better eyes) tablet

That's 7 of these things if you count the school's and 6 if you don't! What am I using?

Well, duh! Did you expect Batman to start wearing green with gold bling? So, score one for the good guys! I did tell, my "Mac is great" brother-in-law" about the onslaught and he laughed, say "ahhh, iPads; the gateway drug of iOS". 

So you all should see this as a cautionary tale!

Buy Broken Stuff....Really!!!

If you don't already do this, your missing something. What am I talking about on this gorgeous Saturday morning (the first cool one this "fall")? It's no secret that I flip computers, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I often leverage the "scratch and dent" bin of eBay and Craigslist for items that I can pick up cheaper than "normal". There are several dynamics to this particular strategy, so lets look at them.

At it's most basic is the "bread and butter" of my little business; the refurbished Corporate laptop. I don't need to get into the benefits of them today, but here's how to squeeze a little more out of them than is already there. If I go out on eBay and just buy a ready to go E6400, I should be able to pick it up for somewhere between $175 and $200, then if I sell it for the typical $225-235, I will have cleared my standard of about $50 (give or take). However, many of these things are sold "part or repair". That means they are missing something. That could be everything "something", but most likely is that they are missing a hard drive, or maybe the A/C adapter too. Sometimes, there's as much as a $100 difference between a "ready to go" machine and one like that. Another factor is this: if I have an appropriate hard drive, in this case a 2.5" SATA HDD of between 80-160Gb/5400rpm, then I'm already ahead of the game. I emphasizes "have" because, if I have to go buy one, it ends up costing around $40 after shipping and it's just not worth it. So where do these drives come from? When I work on a computer and it's trashed, or the client needs/wants an upgrade, then I save the drive. If they want, I'll destroy it, but that's rarely the case. Also, when I get a computer for my family, I always pull the mechanical hard drive and replace it with an SSD. So, over time, I accumulate a number of good condition drives up here in my cabinet just waiting for a job. You might wonder if this is safe and/or ethical. Here's the deal; if after I've DBAN'd it, and "clean-loaded" an OS on one of these guys, the probability that someone is going to try and extract old data off of it is pretty darned slim! So, if I'm careful in buying the "new" machine and pick one of those "Parts or Repair" jobbies that still have the caddy and cover, then I'm golden! For Pete sakes though, don't buy one without the caddy/cover, or you'll end up spending upwards of $25 just ordering that little piece of metal and plastic! 

The same thing goes for the T61, T400/500 machines from Lenovo ThinkPad. These are corporate machines and when they come "off lease" or are surplus'd due to replacement, many entities require the company handling the old machines to physically destroy the drives. Anybody like banks, insurance companies and hospitals which require client record confidentiality will then put thousands of these computers into the secondary market w/o a drive! The better surplusers, will save the caddy/HDD cover, but the sloppy ones will just destroy the whole thing. This whole process will allow you to either make more money or if you are buying for yourself, save more money. I've often upgraded our own computers using this technique and end up making it a zero-sum operation.

Here's the next Frugal Propellerhead trick: buy outright broken stuff.... really! Understand before we proceed that there are risks with this. It's simply not 100% and sometimes you lose. However, knowing this, if the price is such that you are OK with the cost/benefit ratio of the equation, then there are great gains to be had. I'll start with my latest conquest. The Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H bought off of Craigslist for $65. I understood that it had a broken PCI-e (x8) slot, and was pretty OK with the knowledge that it was usable even without that slot. At worse I could use it in my HTPC which would never need a second graphics card. Besides, this was an ATX board with a third full-length slot (albeit a x4). However, the upside was that this is a board which is at worse, a year old, and at best 6-months or less since the Z77 platform was current right up until the release of the Z87 "Haswell" chipset. And as you guys know from an earlier post, I did a RMA (which was approved) on this guy and it's on it's way to Gigabyte. So in a week or so, I'll have a replacement in hand. 

That little episode was so successful, I've decided to do it again. This time, with a Gigabyte GV-R7750OC graphic card. I've been wanting to upgrade my vid-card for some time, not because I need more power (I don't), but because, my HD 6700, on a fairly regular basis, will behave strangely. It will give me artifacts around my mouse cursor, and if I don't reboot quickly, it'll go "black screen" and lock up the box. This is not acceptable on my main workstation on which depend pretty heavily. So, why don't I just pick up one of the many really cheap, 5000 or even 4000 series cards and replace it then? Well, for one thing; I'm kind of a stubborn cus' and don't like using "bottom-feeder" gear on my primary machine. And secondly, I will on occasion, convert a video or two, but most importantly do photo-editing on rather large DSLR generated image files. There's that, plus I want a cool running card as well. Those specialty passively cooled "mid-line" cards are really kind of hard to find and they tend to be a little pricey (at least to me) when you do find one. What to do? While researching cards for my client's gaming computer, I had zero'd in on AMD's 7xxx mid-line otherwise know as the "Southern Islands" series. In there is a low-powered model designated as the 7750. So low-powered that it doesn't need external power. Now; that's for me! However, I didn't want to pay the $90-100 for a new one. Yeah, that's right......I want nice higher end products, but don't want to pay the price. Did I say that I'm a stubborn 'cus.....hence Frugal Propellerhead? Not surprised that I bought a "parts or repair", "untested" (meaning, "we know it doesn't work, but you can hope") one off of eBay for $45, are ya? Would you be surprised to learn that Gigabyte also warranty's these guys for 3 Years like their motherboards? And that, I've got run it through their RMA process and currently waiting for approval to send it back?

One more example. In case you forgot: a little more than a year ago, I bought an "as is" ThinkPad Tablet (original Android version) for a very good price. The same day that I received it, I shipped it to Lenovo as a warranty repair since (of course) it was still within a year of purchase. They didn't have the parts to fix it within the specified time-frame for a "corporate" item, so it was arranged that they would drop-ship a NEW one directly to my house. Yup, that's how it's done! 

Any failures? Yup; I bought a couple of refurbished Dell Stream 7 tablets from Newegg. Unfortunately, the power connector broke on my son's pretty quickly and within what Newegg had assured me to be Dell's warranty period. That turned out not to be the case and after several unproductive discussions with their consumer support facility in India, it went nowhere. Newegg however, was gratious enough to do a partial refund and we moved on from that episode. What's the lesson? I could very well turn the name of this whole blog into: DON'T BUY CONSUMER!!!

State of Support

My children are/were happy! Their Christmas present this year are the Dell Streak 7s, and due to circumstances, they actually received them a month ago when we took a Thanksgiving trip to to see their granddad in Midland. A 6 hour car trip is absolutely what the Android tablets are designed for! It was a good purchase at a very good price: $125 from Newegg....refurbished. I'm not going to go into the reason I bought those here since I did that in a previous post, but I'll say that I've been impress so far.

That was until a couple of weeks ago. One day my son brought me his tablet saying that it wouldn't charge. So, I tried using the cord and adapter from my daughter's Streak 7 and still no go. I was pretty hot figuring that it was something that he did and now he'd killed his Christmas present.....before Christmas week even! However, after I cooled off, I took some time to look up the issue and it's apparent, that the charge connector going bad is pretty common with this tablet. So I called Newegg, who said that although it was beyond their return period (which of knew already) of 30 days, it was an official "refurbished" product, therefore covered by Dell for 90 days and I could just contact Dell myself. And since it was December 21st at that point and I bought it on September 22nd, I called Dell immediately. The person I talked to said that I would need to send them my proof of purchase and they would be able to put me into their "Mobility Support" system. I did that immediately. Two days later (last night), I received a call back saying that they had received my proof of purchase and they were processing my request. I would need to call back the next day (today). So I returned their call this morning to be told that the tablet was "out of warranty" and since it was an "end of life" product, they couldn't extend it. My reply was that it was not out of warranty where I initiated the call, so therefore they were still bound by it. After having that customer service rep tell me the exact same thing 3 times, I asked him to "escalate" the call, at which point I got the "Floor Manager", who told me the same thing 3 more times. My response at that stage was to explain to him, that since the product was in fact within the original 90 days when I initiated the case, that in fact what he was telling me was that Dell is refusing to honor the warranty for a product because it was "out of production". The response was another round of telling me that they couldn't extend the warranty. After the second time I explained to him what he was saying, the response was silence. Then he said that he would have to pass this on to his superiors who would call me back within two days. That's where it stands at the moment.

On the other-hand, my experience with Lenovo/ThinkPad brand went like this..... As you guys know, I bought a broken tablet that was still under warranty by Lenovo. I received it, and called them the same day. The following day, a pre-paid box arrived and the tablet was sent off to EZ Serv, in Memphis. A week later I was told that they didn't have the part necessary to repair the tablet "within an acceptable period of time", and that they would discuss this with the associated division within Lenovo as ask that a replacement be sent to me. The following day, I was called to say that Lenovo had agreed and would send out a new tablet to me directly from China. 10 days later, a brand new, never-been-opened tablet of identical spec to my original arrived. End of story. 

I would find out later that this model of tablet, is in fact an end of life product for them as well, having decided to move to Windows 8 on their Tablet 2. So, what's the difference? Is Lenovo that much better than Dell? Is it because I had to deal with one of the dreaded, India support centers? I believe that answer to both questions is an unequivical...."NO"! The difference? .....is that the ThinkPad was supported on the "corporate support" side of the business, and the Dell is being supported on the "consumer" side of their business. That's why the Dell center I was directed to was in India in the first place! Businesses routinely don't put up with "off-shore" support. I don't have any issues with Indian support centers per se. I have found them to be excellent in providing polite, and patient service. On occasion, I struggle with their accents, but I'm certain that they struggle with mine as well. 

The real issue is that corporate support philosophically wants to keep the customer happy at all costs. The caller could very well be a high level IT professional with the ability to influence if not make the decision on 100s of thousands of dollars worth of purchases based on their experience. I know; I was that guy once. On the other hand, consumer support quite typically is dealing with a "single purchase" consumer who quite often cause the problem themselves and the philosophy for these big firms is to minimize the damage to the company in terms of $$$. We all know what that means. Which is why I almost always recommend a professional (corporate) level product is there is a choice! 

We have some friends who are looking to buy a tablet for their teenage daughter......any guesses what I recommended?

"OCD" Tendencies and Control

I know; this thing starts off sounding like some kind of Sophomore Psychology paper, but I promise, it's not! OK, I do have a little bit of "a thing" related to keyboards and mice. I seem to have been on a never ending quest for th ultimate in the keyboard/mice combination for years now. However, in the last few years, I seem to have settled on pretty much one or two brands and styles of input devices. This Sunday morning blog will be devoted to what I use to control my various media consumption devices in our system. In fact, as I sit here typing this, I've got the living room HTPC working playing music streamed from the file server in the office.

On the notebook side of things, it's been pretty easy: there's simply nothing better than the traditional ThinkPad keyboard. So much so, that I even use one on my secondary XP OS desktop computer in the UltraNav form, which is really a ThinkPad keyboard married to a conventional PC connection.

Actually, if I had a magic wand, I'd create a wireless version of this for HTPC functions and be done with it, but unfortunately we don't have that yet, soooooo........ 

  

So, my alternative is the Logitech DiNovo series of input devices. Over the last few years, I've had a lot of experience with this (and other) series from Logitech. This all started when I realized that I typed faster and more accurately on laptop style keyboard vs. the regular kind. However, back in those days, keyboards with that style of keys few and far between. Eventually, I found the first of DiNovo series and got one. I hated the lag in the Bluetooth receivers of that day, but loved the feel of the devices. Eventually I found the wired "Illuminated" KB, in combination with the "Revolution" mouse was perfect for my desktop needs, but the HTPC was a different animal all together. What was needed was a compact unit with some level of mouse function built-in, as well as wireless interface better than RF. Enter the DiNovo Edge. This elegant package was pretty much everything I needed all-in-one device.

There was a couple of downsides though. Even though it was compact compared to a regular keyboard, and included pointing functions, it was still a little large AND oddly enough, it doesn't include multi-media control functions such as "play/pause", "skip", "Stop", etc.! 

Enter the Logitech DiNovo Mini. This little device is a full-functioning keyboard (thumb style) with pointing function almost identical to the Edge. Actually I came across it trying to find something to use in my classroom that would do more than advance PowerPoint slides and be small enough to hold in one hand and/or slip in my pants pocket. 

As you can see, it has a pretty normal keyboard layout and is in fact, extremely compact. 

Another plus is that it uses the exact same Bluetooth 2.0 EDR receiver that the Edge does, so I can actually have both devices connected and in use at the same time! Actually, I have one receiver attached to either HTPC and just move the devices around as necessary. It may seem odd, but I usually have the Edge with fullsized keyboard in the bedroom and the Mini in the living room mostly as I've found that I rarely if ever type anything in the livng room machine, but quite often will do some web-surfing in the bedroom. 

Now of course, with us moving to day-to-day use of the ThinkPad tablets running Android, I'll be looking at Android control solutions like GMote.

This is of course the "next level" and will take some work to get comfortable with, but that's part of the fun isn't it?!?

Age of the "Slate"

Not even we, are immune the trends. About a month ago, the first tablet came to live at our house. I've alluded to it before, but never fully explained how I got what might be one of greatest "deals" in my Frugal Propellerhead career. So let me back up to the middle of the summer when this all started.

 At that point, my iPad toting brother-in-law who spent the summer here had been around for a month, and my techno-lust had been well-and-truly ignited. Of course, me being me, I didn't really want an iPad that seemingly every pretentious house-wife and fashionista twenty-something was toting around. Even my father-in-law had given in to the the disease and gotten one for his wife. So obviously that was pretty much off of my radar.....even if I could rationalize or afford it. 

What I really wanted was the ThinkPad "Slate" Tablet, by Lenovo. I didn't want it because it was a ThinkPad. I wanted it because of what made it a ThinkPad Tablet. It was everything that the iPad wasn't; it was function first and really pretty utilitarian in design. Not to say it's ugly, it's a bit of a "government agency GMC Yukon" of tablets. Of course you can read about it on one of the many review sites, but let me at least say that I'm more than pleased with the performance. It's equipped with a 10" IPS screen covered with Gorilla glass and packs a dual core processor supported by 64Gb of storage, not to mention the full SD card slot!

However, it's really the "back-story" of how I came to have it that's more interesting....so here goes. When I started looking at tablets. I was originally intent on starting out by purchasing a cheap android clone just to play around with, before I invested in something nicer. In fact, I had found a guy on Craig's List who was trying to sell a little 7" Viewsonic for $30. However, that seller was kind of flaky and never would meet me, so the sale never came to fruition. As many of you are aware, when I get interested in something, I spend a lot of time researching and hours on eBay watching them. Of course I was aware of the ThinkPad Tablet, but couldn't even afford the $250-300 that I sometimes saw them sell for, much less the $550 to $650 that they sold at new. Therefore, they were pretty much a "pipe-dream". Then, one day while scanning the eBay ads, I came across a guy selling a "new-looking", but "non-working" ThinkPad Tablet for $200. Knowing that they hadn't been out for very long, I was curious why the guy didn't just send it in for warranty repairs. We messaged back and forth on eBay; enough so that I was comfortable with him being what he claimed to be......which was someone who goes out to auctions and buys up pallets of goods. He said that it was in a "mixed lot" pallet and the rest of what he had for sale pretty much bore this out. What it means, is that his business is to go to various auctions, bid on pallets of goods that can come from almost anywhere, but commonly, from places that have gone out of business. So they end up with all manner of stuff that they don't have time to test thoroughly. They make money, by "flipping" this stuff as quickly as possible and do it all over again. 

Anyway, the most interesting part was that although he tried.....and ultimately failed to figure out how to work Lenovo's support site to find out the warranty status. Lenovo, like all the other bigger corporate suppliers typically have 1 to 3 year warranty periods which are pretty liberal. So, after a little digging, I figured out that the tablet in question, which by the way was the highest spec 64Gb model was covered till November 23rd of this year! And, before I offered him $150 (which he accepted), I even told him about it! Then began my odyssey with Lenovo warranty service:

1. The day I received it from the seller, I called Lenovo support- 
2. they sent out a box which I received the next day- 
3. that same day I got it back on UPS to the Memphis repair depot (which used to the EZ-Serv division of IBM)- 
4. the following day they acknowledged that the tablet had been received and said it would take a week- 
5. after a week, I saw online that it was "on hold for parts" so I called them to find out what happened- 
6. got escalated to a manager- who called me the next day to say that they weren't going to have that part for some time and they'd talk to Lenovo to see what they could do- 
7. a day later, he called me to say that Lenovo had agreed to replace it with a new unit......shipped directly from the factory in China!!! 
8.  Two weeks after that, I receive delivery of a brand new ThinkPad "Slate" Tablet directly to my house.......after one month of my time and $150 invested!

Do I love it more because it was ridiculously cheaper than what the normal price should have been? Yup, I sure do....but that's not the end of the story. Apparently I don't love it as much as my 9 year old son and 6 year old daughter, so we all know what that means, right!?! You got it......

Daddy-Claus has been busily looking for something for Christmas. After examing a crazy number of different tablets, it came down to what I was willing to spend on two elementary aged kids while making the salary of a teacher. That turns out to be around $100 give or take. Decision parameters?

• Their kids! If we were a part of a different demographic, maybe it'd be a no-brainer and we'd just buy iPads........hmmmmm...........naaaaaawwww.
• It needed to be small for kid hands and so they could carry it around in backpacks etc.
• It needed to have a dual-core processor so it could run something better than Android Gingerbread.
• It needed to be better-built than the usual "no-name" clones that may run great, or may break after a week. 

Actually the device that got me going was the Arnova 7, specifically the 7F G3 that Micro Center had on their sales flier for $100. For those who aren't familiar with them, Arnova, is a low-end branding used by Archos, a French electronics manufacturer. Although, not exactly an iPad killer, it does have a dual-core and comes loaded with Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Therefore, now that I had a legitimate price for a 7" tablet running something other than warmed-over phone Android, from an honest-to-gosh manufacturer, I now had a standard. 

 What I had figured out was this: 

1. I could buy a decent tablet pretty much any time, new or used for around $100. All you have to do is to do a search on the local Craig's List.
2. Unfortunately, at that price, all you'll usually get is an old single-core machine only capable of running Android "Gingerbread"....like the Lenovo IdeaPad A1 (illustrated above).
3. I wanted one built at least as nicely as the Lenovo IdeaPad....
4. But wanted it to be able to run Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) or better.....
5. And of course, I only wanted to spend around $100

So it looked like it was going to be the Arnova 7F G3 for a while.....right up until I came across the Dell Streak 7, being sold by Newegg, "refurbished" for $120. Here was everything I was looking for in one package. As part of the refurbishing, these unit are loaded with Honeycomb. It comes with Gorilla-Glass (just like my ThinkPad Slate), and a full sized SD card slot. And I'm betting that the refurbishing amounted to loading the new OS, flashing the ROM and replacing the backs with one that doesn't have T-Mobile markings! I'd lay even money that Newegg got a sweetheart deal on them when T-Mobile decided to get rid of the ones that hadn't sold yet from their original cost-supplimented deal they had cut with Dell. Anyway; I don't really care. I'm going to look good at Christmas this year is all I know!

Which leaves one thing left to do. You guessed it: A tablet for the wife of course! Let me give you one quote and see if you translate it as quickly as I did. Upon being offered to use my Slate, she said: "No, that's your tablet". The emphasis is mine of course, but you got the message, right? Now I've just got to decide whether to go with any one of the following options:

• A "rooted" HP TouchPad running Android 4.0 (ICS)- Least expensive
• A Motorola Xoom- Middle of the road (cost-wise)
• Or give in, worship at the alter of Jobs and buy her an iPad- Most expensive 

 

Of course, this is a conundrum all to itself and obviously in need of a separate post.