Silly name, a bit bulky, but overall a functional mp3 music player. The venerable ipod shuffle is sorely missed. SanDisk Clip Jam features MP3 player Radio 8gb or 32gb storage sdcard support a bit bulky crap menu system unintuitive buttons Sandisk Clip Jam Playlist Lament My review of the Sandisk Clip Jam is a lament ... Read more
The Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) is a 4" x 4" board (4.5" x 4.5" x 2.0" case) integrated computer. It comes in kit (without ram or storage) or as assembled computers. With the ATX form factor going away, the NUC form factor is increasingly viable as a general purpose replacement. There are even ... Read more
I've run custom roms in the past, when Cyanogenmod was the rage, on an HTC Desire (bravo). The main reason was the 576mb of ram made increasingly bloated Google services untenable. I think I modded another HTC after that, but then went down the rabbit hole of the Iphone 5. After that one got tiresome/wore ... Read more
The Onyx Boox Nova Pro is a popular 7.8" eNote device with grayscale e-ink Carta screen, and a Wacom touchscreen layer, under mobius and glass. The hardware includes USB-C, an on/off/sleep button and a back button, along with bluetooth and wifi. The main advantage, though still a bit incomplete, is the ability to read and ... Read more
See also LineageOS on the Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 Google Play Store on Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 While the Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 ships with Google Play installed, if one does a factory reset, then the resulting MIUI 9.x does not bundle with Google Play Store or the GBoard keyboard. There are several steps needed ... Read more
In this post I outline what I would consider a compelling form factor, one which existed for a while, but which may be is returning for certain niche uses. Usability and Useful Form Factors While the term notebook has been taken over to mean a laptop computer that is much larger on average than a ... Read more
Blast from the past, this request for smartphone/netbook recommendations comes from May, 2009. Updated below with comments from July, 2018. Note that we've updated the title from Netbooks to Chromebooks. Help! Too Many Choices Jeff, I am in need of a portable device for accessing email when I'm on the road. Of course it would ... Read more
The Asus C101PA is a Rockchip (arm) and has the same baseboard as the Samsung Chromebook Plus. Both of these are up next for getting Crostini / Linux Containers. As a sub platform of ChromeOS it turns out that this is a very good device that is fairly high up in the stack of platforms ... Read more
See also LineageOS on Xiaomi The Xiaomi Redmi 4A (aka Rolex) is a cheap (~100 USD) and lightweight (131.5g) 5" phone. For price, weight, and size, there is not much competiton. The screen is a 720 x 1280 px 16x9 screen that is pretty decent. Its got a Snapdragon 425 and 2gb of RAM with ... Read more
Note: 43" 4K monitors are likely taking over this WQHD space. Also beware the VA panels, they just don't perform as well as IPS. Second Note: the problem of using a 4K TV for a monitor is in the viewing angles. Also Chroma subsampling is needed for decent support of text. What appears to be ... Read more