My old Motorola Xoom tablet has been slowly dying on my lately. It has been running slower and slower. Part of the reason, I think, is because Google\/Motorola stopped supporting development of the Android OS for it. So it doesn’t get updates anymore, which means it’s stuck on 4.1.<\/p>\n
Also, the hardware is old, so programs that have become more and more greedy when it comes to CPU and memory are running out of room to work.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t help that it weighs a ton, and becomes uncomfortable to use after a few hours.<\/p>\n
I saw a sale on the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 pen tablet the other day, and finally decided to buy one. I have a few good reasons for it.<\/p>\n
First, it supports microSD cards up to 64GB. I have a lot of e-books and MP3 files, and I want to be able to fill that up. The tablet only comes in 16GB models, which I find somewhat annoying, but less annoying if there’s an microSD card slot.<\/p>\n
Second, it has a Wacom pressure sensitive stylus, with that bit cooked into one of the layers of the OS. I like Wacom products a lot, so I see this as a definite plus. If I can find a good drawing program, I’ll be set.<\/p>\n
I’ve had it for a couple of days now, and I like the tablet overall. The display is crisp, colors are good, and sound is good enough. (I use headphones anyway.)<\/p>\n
Yes, it’s plasticky, but I don’t care. Compared to the Xoom, it feels feather-light. If plastic makes it lighter, then by all means, make it all plastic. It’s just as strong as anything else.<\/p>\n
My only beef is with all of the “Software I don’t want or need” that Samsung insists on dumping on the tablet. I don’t need a Samsung version of every Google program I already use. What’s worse is that I can’t uninstall the Samsung software. Samsung makes great hardware, but I like the Google software.<\/p>\n
Let me run what I want. It’s like buying a laptop full of crapware. I wind up formatting the hard drive and doing a clean install anyway.<\/p>\n
I would love to put Cyanogen on this, but then I’m afraid I’d lose some of the pen pressure support, and it may be just as much or more of a hassle than keeping the software I won’t use, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Motorola Xoom is dying, so I replaced it with a Samsung Note 8.0, because I thought I would really dig the stylus made by Wacom. I like the stylus a lot–I just wish Samsung would let me remove the preinstalled software I don’t want. Otherwise, it’s a great little 8-inch tablet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[364,511,732,512],"class_list":["post-1308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-android","tag-motorola-xoom","tag-samsung","tag-tablet","category-120-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1309,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions\/1309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}