So far well worth the money, April 12, 2011

By 

Laura J. Churchill – See all my reviews

  

My Arnova 10 arrived yesterday. Upon turning it on, the 1st thing it did was start calibration for the touch sensitivity. This is important because if you have a heavy touch, the screen will scratch. I’m being very careful about that.

This computer is solidly built. I had my mom up here helping me set up a hot spot for the wireless connection and she tripped over the charge cord dragging the tablet off of the table crashing to the floor. Considering I had JUST gotten it three hours before, I thought I was going to cry! But it was fine! I couldn’t believe it!

One of the early things I did was uninstall some of the apps that I knew I had no interest in, like Eurosports. Nope. Don’t need that. We went to start installing a couple apps like Angry Birds and the Kindle app for android. Angry Birds went on easy but didn’t play well at 1st. It was REALLY laggy. But this morning I discovered how to turn off the background on the game and now it plays MUCH better.

I wish I could say the same for the kindle app. It was a bear to find a site that would actually download it. I kept going to the android marketplace to get it and everytime I would try to get it, the screen would just refresh and leave me sitting there staring at the same thing. No download. We finally managed to pull it down and install it off another site. So we went to Amazon and picked up a couple free kindle books there. Those two books are sitting on the archives on amazon right now. I try to bring them down to the device and it tells me something went wrong, to delete them and bring them back down from the archives. I don’t know what’s with that. So we went to project gutenberg and manually downloaded to the desktop a book. Hooked the tablet up to the desktop via USB and dragged the book to the tablet and into the kindle app. It runs like a dream that way.

If at 1st you don’t succeed, try try again I suppose.

Yes, this is my 1st droid. I’m slowly getting the hang of using it. I don’t believe this tablet would be for someone without at least some technical knowledge of computers. But for those people who know a lot of work-arounds, this tablet can be a lot of fun.

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A fancy MP3 player and Internet browser at this point, April 28, 2011

I have been messing with my Arnova for over a week now. I have talked to Amazon and Overdrive Media Console tech support to determine why it will not run the Amazon Appstore, Kindle or OMC app’s. I bought this machine thinking I would have a reader that also acted as a tablet. Right now, I have a tablet that plays music and allows me to surf the net but it will not run any of the Amazon apps and I cannot get it to run OMC so you can download free books from the library. These are 2 of the most important reasons I bought the machine and they are not working.

The enclosed documentation is minimal, little more than a diagram of the controls. I have contacted Arnova twice via their automated support line and received no response even though it says you will hear from them within 2 business days. The device seems to start lagging once it has been on for a while, a shutdown and reboot brings it back but it is a pain. Public wifi is a headache but that could be the wifi too. Documentation is so bad you have to guess what is going on, for example, I keep dragging icons from the app screen to the home screen and have not been able to remove them.

In short, this is a device with a lot of kinks. If you are willing to work through them on your own the bargain is worth it. If not, get something else.

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Slow responsive touch screen, April 12, 2011

I bought this tablet from JR.com via Amazon. When I got it, I spent a few hours on: checking responsiveness of the touch screen, installing apps, and testing speed. I have a HTC Evo 4G with android 2.2. So I compare this tablet with the performance with my cell phone.

Touch screen: the responsiveness is fairly under expectation. I kept getting missing letters when typing. Slow response when click a link in web browser. Comparing with my cell phone, this tablet is unacceptable.

Apps: I tried to install two apps which I installed on my cellphone. Those two apps worked perfectly on my HTC phone. However, both apps kept crashing on this tablet. No built in app store preinstalled on it. Not convenient.

Speed: I used three devices with the same WiFi hotspot to test web browsing speed. Laptop, cellphone, and tablet. This tablet is way too slow comparing with the other two devices when loading an average page, not image intensive. It is more like a 6+ year old laptop speed.

After looking at these three key aspects, I decided to spend some more dollars to get a solid tablet. Not this one.

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An O.K Tablet with Decent Features, June 30, 2011

Archos already makes fairly cheap tablets, but believe it or not, the company’s going after an even cheaper segment with its Arnova 8. The tablet is very cheap going for 0 dollars and packs Android 2.1 software. It plays music, videos up to 720p,view photos, browse the web and more. Thuogh this is a Android tablet you dont access to the Andriod Market but an alternative called “AppsLib” with fewer apps. Though you can obtain full access to Andriod Market using custom firmware. This tablet is weak coming with only 600MHz with a Rockchip RK2818 processor, 200 MB of internal memory and 4GB of storage, but for its price its definitly worth picking up. Its pretty nice.

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Slow, poor touchscreen, not “4GB” internal memory, May 16, 2011

Got the device today and very unsatisfied. Here is the detail:

1. Slow device. It takes 10 seconds in my home wifi network to open google.com;

2. Poor touchscreen. The most important issue for tablet is the touchscreen. Apple is absolutely the best. With their high price it’s worthy. For this one, my Google Nexus One is much much better than it.

3. Resolution. It’s 800×600 TFT High resolution screen (800 x 600 pixels), 16 million colors.(On the description). But if you look clearly you will feel the different. It’s like a 2006 LCD model.

4. This is not a 4GB internal memory device. The internal memory is 2xx mb and 4GB is for the memory card slot ONLY.

Overall, it’s a poor device and way below my expectation. I decide to return it at the same day, tonight. I saw the seller’s return policy and it said “Open Box” item will be charged 15% restocking fee. I only open by removing the plastic cover, and I hope I can get the fee waived. If that’s the case I will give one more star for the seller’s service.

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