Offline Notes | A short review of some of my tablets

I don't remember when I started writing this but Google Keep on mobile makes it hard to see the creation date so just assume I wrote it a few weeks before the other dated notes I wrote below. Sometimes I just have the same shit going on in my head for a while so even before I go on a rant I can almost feel it coming.

Sometime mid-January 2024

Data just ran out on my moms tablet and she just took my phone to go charge it. I've got nothing better to do than to sit here and write a little. This is already shaping out to be another one of my tech rants. I don't actually know what else I can say about the tech in this situation since all of my personal devices are offline as well. I guess I can talk a little about the work flow/experience using my moms tablet. Lets start off with talking a little about the specs.

The tablet was given to my mom as part of a government plan from Assurance Wireless. It is a Vortex T10M Pro. Shares the exact same CPU (different SOC but the same Cortex A53 cores) as what's in the Amazon Fire Tab HD 8 from 2019 but it has a Imagination Technologies PorwerVR Rogue GE8300 GPU powering a 10" LCD display, that regardless of the bigger size shares the exact same 1280x800 resolution as the Fire Tab HD 8.

I've played a few games and even though it can power through COD mobile struggles to keep up in PSP emulation. To be fair when I found out about the CPU I didn't expect to really enjoy using her tablet but I figured that the newer Andoird 13 that was on it would atleast open it up to more up to date software as I can already see that being an issue for my older Fire Tabs. I didn't realize however how much the GPU was really going to help. Granted I can still find the limits to this tablet but it is deffinitely smoother than either of my Fire Tabs.

My older 8th gen Fire Tab HD 8 is basically just good for taking notes at this point. For anything else it can really just hold me back. Even just for watching YouTube it struggles. Really wish I could watch 720p 60fps video without my bluetooth earphones going out of sync with the video. If anything being offline makes it faster since it's doing less stuff in the background and I don't have many big tasks I can do in the forground when I'm offline. Too bad it struggles with games, even the offline ones. I can barely finish a level in Data wing with this thing. But for writing notes and listening to music it's great. It might even be a good IDE for me to program for my site. That would really help me get back into blogging too (You might even get to read about this there when I post it up)

The middle child, also a Fire Tab HD 8 but the 10th gen, is really good for playing Stardew Valley. Will try Terraria soon. I know I've been able to get Minecraft running on it before but I wasn't able to use my controller. Seems "FireOS" handles controllers differently. I recently figured out Minecraft added a full keyboard control option which might let me play with just my keyboard. I had this same issue with my older tablet but much slower since it struggled with the game.

2/19/2024 I got a mouse working recently on all my devices and its improved my productivity a whole lot. I don't actually need it all the time especiallly since the touch screens on all my devices work. I've got some tablets in storage that aren't so fortunate. I've got 2 Nexus 7's that would benifit from this but I need to actually try to daily drive one to know if it's even worth carrying around long-term. I was able to use one of them a lot before the touch completely died. (it was actually already broken when I bought it from a friend but I always had trouble getting a replacement screen for it and I bought a second one that wasn't even cracked, thinking I could get the screen off it, and it just didn't work, never tried taking it apart though so I have no idea if something is disconnected inside)

Those tablets might actually be nice to use since they came with really good hardware for the time.

2/21/2024 Anyway I think its time I should rap up this rant. I'm getting ready to turn this into a blog post for my site and my Spacehey. I'm going to link my Spacehey here as well specifcally for this post because I think it makes sense that as I start to take my own writing seriously that I should cross promote my various platforms. Who knows, maybe I get comfortable enough to share to my more mainstream communicatiom channels because I have too many social platforms and not enough reasoms to be a part of them. At my current standing it still feels like I can disappear into obscurity forever if I don't take advantage of these spaces. I'm also hoping to expand myself and write about more than just tech or whatever other weird and obscure thing that I've alreadu been exposed to. What I mean by that as well is that I want to put in the work to hear about other peoples experiences and get into deeper more meaningful conversations about life that doesn't just revolve around me and my own experience of the world. So seriously feel free to contact me on Spacehey and I plan to make other communication channels available to people to chat with me. I have a Matrix space listed on my Spacehey that I'd also like people to join in on ;D