Sunday, June 11, 2017

Zenpad



(My new toy.)

I've resisted the urge to buy a smartphone so far because I can't justify the expense, and being tied into a 2-year phone contract. However, I've been itching to get a tablet computer for some time. It's the kind of thing that would be useful in my work as an English teacher, for displaying in the free talk lessons the photos and videos I've taken, and as a spell-checker look-up. I finally decided to commit to one, and after looking at all the CNet.com reviews, I settled on the Asus Zenpad 8. After tax, and with a 64 gigabyte Micro SD card, the total package came to about 30,000 yen ($290 USD).

It's taking some time to get used to it. There's already a couple of things I don't like (not being able to create directories from my laptop when tethered through the USB cable, and not being able to easily find the icon for bringing up the WiFi connections list when I go to a place with WiFi access). But, those are relatively minor. I'm still struggling to get things working the way I want (figuring out what to name the links for the HTML pages I'm writing for the dictionary files I want to use). I had been having problems playing Windows .wmv videos - Android doesn't support .wmvs right out of the box, and the apps I downloaded off Google play kept freezing the video portion, or stuttering on the audio. I finally discovered that the problem is that I'd created the .wmvs in large screen, hi def format, and the file sizes were just too big. Resaving them in a smaller 640 x 480 format works much better. But now, I'm having issues with the zenpad automatically changing the screen brightness on me all the time.

Otherwise, I am having fun with it, and I'd like to believe that it will get easier as I get more practice on it.

Yes. I'd like to believe that.

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