So I recently got a new laptop and a new phone. Since I've been in the habit of vaguely reviewing these kindsa products when I get new ones, I guess I'll do just that.
Laptop. So the last laptop that I had (a Lenovo) crapped out after less than a year and a half (the CD/DVD drive just stopped working, and the whole thing would overheat and shut itself down without a notebook cooler). Anyways, so one of the summer interns at my company last year had a tablet PC, and I thought it was really neat. So when I had to get myself a new laptop, I was mainly looking at tablets, and wound up with the HP Touchsmart tx2z. This was billed as the first consumer multi-touch tablet PC. I got it from Best Buy, since all told, it was actually cheaper there than from the HP website. One of the down-sides to that though, was that it came pre-configured with the slowest processor available in that line. And I don't know if it's the AMD processor or the fact that it runs 64-bit Windows, but what I DO know is that a year and a half after I bought my last laptop, I thought I'd be upgrading but wound up with one that actually runs slower. >_< Fail!
But yea, in all honesty, I really don't use the tablet features often enough to justify how much extra I paid for a computer of these specs. (Though I must say that the stylus input with Chinese character recognition WAS pretty cool.) Well, I learned my lesson, and I guess I don't ever need to buy a tablet PC again. =/ I mean, I guess I'm not super disappointed by my purchase, but like, did you ever order something out of a catalog as a kid, and spend weeks psyching yourself about how awesome it was gonna be as it shipped, and then it gets to you, and you're like wait, this is IT?? Yea, it was a feeling kinda like that. -_- I'd rate this laptop a 6, maybe 7, in terms of how it satisfied my expectations.
Phone. My family's cell phone contract finally ended in January, and when we renewed, I got the Nokia Xpress Music 5310. It's a slim candybar phone whose main feature is its music playing capability (it has a 3.5 mm jack for headphones, instead of the funky weird one on most phones). I figured I'd try just having a music player phone instead of shelling out for a new iPod after my old one got stolen like a month and a half earlier.
Anyways, I'm not super impressed with the software design & customizability, but in terms of the bare essentials, it gets the job done ok. Seriously, no way to set a silent but vibrating alarm?? And it's kind of a pain to set up playlists or find exactly the song you're looking for if you've got a long library of songs (it lets you expand (I think up to 8Gb?) with a microSD card). Battery life isn't stellar on this thing either- I feel like I'm charging it every day and a half or so, and more often when I've been listening to music a lot. Overall though, it pretty much met my expectations for a new phone; I'd recommend it. But yea, I figure maybe a couple more years, and maybe we'll finally be [not-cheap] enough to get smartphones... maybe, hahah.
Laptop. So the last laptop that I had (a Lenovo) crapped out after less than a year and a half (the CD/DVD drive just stopped working, and the whole thing would overheat and shut itself down without a notebook cooler). Anyways, so one of the summer interns at my company last year had a tablet PC, and I thought it was really neat. So when I had to get myself a new laptop, I was mainly looking at tablets, and wound up with the HP Touchsmart tx2z. This was billed as the first consumer multi-touch tablet PC. I got it from Best Buy, since all told, it was actually cheaper there than from the HP website. One of the down-sides to that though, was that it came pre-configured with the slowest processor available in that line. And I don't know if it's the AMD processor or the fact that it runs 64-bit Windows, but what I DO know is that a year and a half after I bought my last laptop, I thought I'd be upgrading but wound up with one that actually runs slower. >_< Fail!
But yea, in all honesty, I really don't use the tablet features often enough to justify how much extra I paid for a computer of these specs. (Though I must say that the stylus input with Chinese character recognition WAS pretty cool.) Well, I learned my lesson, and I guess I don't ever need to buy a tablet PC again. =/ I mean, I guess I'm not super disappointed by my purchase, but like, did you ever order something out of a catalog as a kid, and spend weeks psyching yourself about how awesome it was gonna be as it shipped, and then it gets to you, and you're like wait, this is IT?? Yea, it was a feeling kinda like that. -_- I'd rate this laptop a 6, maybe 7, in terms of how it satisfied my expectations.
Phone. My family's cell phone contract finally ended in January, and when we renewed, I got the Nokia Xpress Music 5310. It's a slim candybar phone whose main feature is its music playing capability (it has a 3.5 mm jack for headphones, instead of the funky weird one on most phones). I figured I'd try just having a music player phone instead of shelling out for a new iPod after my old one got stolen like a month and a half earlier.
Anyways, I'm not super impressed with the software design & customizability, but in terms of the bare essentials, it gets the job done ok. Seriously, no way to set a silent but vibrating alarm?? And it's kind of a pain to set up playlists or find exactly the song you're looking for if you've got a long library of songs (it lets you expand (I think up to 8Gb?) with a microSD card). Battery life isn't stellar on this thing either- I feel like I'm charging it every day and a half or so, and more often when I've been listening to music a lot. Overall though, it pretty much met my expectations for a new phone; I'd recommend it. But yea, I figure maybe a couple more years, and maybe we'll finally be [not-cheap] enough to get smartphones... maybe, hahah.
posted by Dear Daniel at 7:00 PM
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