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Perhaps the Wii U, which has had very disappointing sales so far, has a chance. After all, Microsoft just released more information on the XBOX One, and they seem to be in the business of screwing over customers. Plus, Black Sabbath! Wait…
TechFan
TechFan Podcast!
First, thanks for the recommendation of the new Black Sabbath, I hadn’t heard it yet. Their drummer, Bill Ward, is alive, there was just a dispute over money.
As to newer hard rock bands, check out Halestorm. They are a terrific band, started as a family band as teenagers, they do enough covers that you can see what they bring to the table, and they have a drop dead gorgeous singer who is a good musician in her own right.
As to Windows RT, I own an Asus VivoTab RT – bought before the Dell deal, I agree that that is the best value now. I never considered full Win 8, it is just too big an OS for tablet hardware, takes up about 32GB of disk space and kills battery life and tuns hot (I don’t want a fan in my tablet). Even RT + Office takes up about 16GB.
At the time I bought it, it was $450 including the keyboard/dock. The keyboard has a second battery,, which doubles battery life to about 16 hours, so I am quite comfortable not carrying the power supply at all for day trips.
I own an iPad, but this actually does some things better. I use it for
Media playback – it has the widescreen format, and it has a micro-HDMI out, so I can play back on a TV with only a cheap cable and no an adapter as I would eed on the iPad.
Storage, it has microSD and USB ports on the tablet (comes with an adapter for full sized USB) and has a full sized USB port on the keyboard. I can carry lots of video. It also has NFC, which I haven’t tried.
Aops – the selection is of course badly lacking compared to an iPad. No good audio editors or layer-based photo editors, etc. There is a fairly good game selection, XBox Music is quite a good built-in music service, and the apps I use most are Netflix, Kindle, and Skype, as well as apps for Twitter, Facebook, and aoo.net (I use third party apps for all of these), and Dropbox, Box, and SkyDrive.. I rarely use Office, but it is included. I think Metro versions of Office apps will be more useful when ready. Mine has the Tegra 3, which is not a bad gaming chip and there are some games which show it off well.
I like (not just tolerate) the OS. I do a Dexter podcast, and the ability to watch an episode while having a second app open to take notes is useful to me. RT takes some getting used to. You have to learn what a swipe from each edge does before it becomes useful and there are really no indications as to what needs to be done (I spent a long time trying to figure out how to shut my first Windows 8 machine down), but once you learn them, the UI works well.
I am curious to hear David’s reaction.