Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Tablet Down

It's been a bad month for my electronic devices. First the phone death, now my tablet gave up the ghost.
Ignore all that gunk on the screen. Just haven't cleaned it since it doesn't work anyway. The crack is the problem.
Unlike the phone, which just stopped working without obvious reason, the tablet was totally my fault. A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally dropped it when getting my stuff out of the car. The lower left corner cracked, which you can see in the picture. Everything still worked at that point, but it obviously weakened the screen, because yesterday a big crack appeared across the entire screen. At that point, the touch functionality stopped working.

I used this tablet almost exclusively for two things: reading comics with ComicRack/Comixology, and playing games like Star Realms and Cthulhu Realms. In both cases, the only thing I really need is a good-sized screen. 9 inches is the minimum to be able to read most comics without constantly having to zoom in and out. This one was 10.1 inches, so it worked well for that.

This wasn't an high-end device to begin with. It's an ASUS Transformer TF300T, which I bought almost exactly 18 months ago. Not a lot of memory, fairly slow processor speed, mediocre camera, etc. Your basic low-end Android tablet. I'd rather have something nicer like a Google Nexus 10, but the low-end device worked for me.

Since I have other options for both the comics and gaming - using my PC - I'm in no hurry to replace this particular electronic device. Probably keep an eye on sales coming my way (I certainly get enough emails about such things) until a good deal comes along. Or better yet, wait until Christmas time. Maybe someone will replace it for me.