Medicationxpert.com Review:
Medication Expert - medication expert, medication, expert
Country: North America, US, United States
City: 78218 San Antonio, Texas
- Ting Kwok - Why does Cable cost more than $100 & why is France better than us in Broadband?Unless you are a telecom or cable TV lawyer, you may not realize why cable TV and broadband internet is so costly and inaccessible when compared to the rest of the world. Susan Crawford, star lawyer in the private sector before she went to academe and government, tells us that monopoly is the answer. She spends one fine chapter of her new book "Captive Audience" giving a history of Brian Roberts and the growth of the cable behemoth Comcast and not Comcast/NBC-Universal. Before that she leads with a sprawling yet engrossing and enthralling tour de force on recent back room legislative history of the various cable telecom laws. She even explains why the BrandX case was wrongly decided and how Scalia's dissent shows the majority's argument of separate services of internet access (pizza delivery) and internet services (the pizza of say a RoadRunner email acct from Time Warner) as illogical.
And why does Time Warner, Comcast and Verizon, AT&T have such monopolies? It is inefficient to allow more than one company dig up the public rights of way. Susan Crawford mentions that without using public rights of way, the cable company's "ownership" of its coaxial cables would be worthless.
More importantly, Crawford (now a professor at Cardozo Law in Manhattan, formerly at the Berkman Centre and originator of One Web Day) advocates for the construction of municipal broadband and has appeared on podcasts of people such as Christopher Mitchell on the webo-sphere, and radio shows like Diane Rehm on WAMU in Washington DC, and University TV like Brian Lehrer's show on CUNY-TV in New York. - Tracey Zillian "Always reading" - Prime is (finally) charging; Time for a review!This review is going to be mostly about my experiences and the little things I've noticed from the Prime for the 2 days thus far that I've owned it. You all already know the specs (and they're pretty much entirely true). My Prime is an Amethyst Gray 32GB.
INTRO:
Let me start off with this: There are bugs. HOWEVER, keep in mind that this is a new tablet quite literally fresh off the press. For what it's worth, these bugs are pretty minor-- If you've ever owned an iPhone you're probably familiar with apps crashing for no good reason (unless I'm just very unlucky). Regardless, apps will occasionally crash on your Prime. There are, in my experience, two types of crashing: The rare crash that you just have to re-open the application and you're good to go, and the consistent crashing of a particular app when you start it. There are a fair number of the latter depending on the app (Tap Tap Revenge 4 being the main culprit for me-- I have yet to see the main screen) but most apps work perfectly fine. Myself, I've been playing World of Magic for about 5 hours straight now. Anyway.
ONSCREEN KEYBOARD:
The first thing I'd like to address is the onscreen keyboard. I don't have the keyboard dock yet (and I would really like to have it now, to be honest). I am an extremely fast (and accurate) typist, so slowing down is not something I'm used to. On my iPhone, I can type as fast as I care to with very few mistakes. This is not the case with the Prime. I have to type noticeably slower and with more care for the words to not mash themselves together in unintelligible fragments. Personally this irritates me, but I know that I type considerably faster than most people, so this is probably just a personal problem. I'm not going to downgrade this to 4 stars for that reason.
SPEAKER:
Oh my gosh, the speaker. You've probably heard about how there's only one- This is true. One or two speakers makes zero difference in this instance. This speaker is the best quality speaker I've ever heard. Better than my netbook, my iPhone, my laptop, all of them. While most speakers begin to get rather crackly as you crank up the volume, even at higher settings there is little to no 'extra noise' from this one. I've listened to music that was on Youtube with this speaker and it's absolutely stunning. If you need a tablet with a good speaker for whatever reason I highly recommend this one. You can definitely tell, if you're paying attention, that music is only coming out one side. But the quality makes that irrelevant. Onwards!
SCREEN:
The screen is beautiful. I've watched HD videos on it with extreme clarity and played games with beautiful graphics: All stunning. The screen is also quite responsive and you can switch through windows with ease. The brightness level is also very impressive. Even at almost 0 brightness, you can see things fairly easily. I generally keep the brightness on about 25%. In fact, anything too far above maybe 70% can be too bright if you are on a page with a lot of lighter colors. I haven't tested the screen outside yet but I don't think IPS+ is even going to be necessary for me. The screen is Gorilla glass if I recall correctly but I'm not going to test the strength of it. Not much else to add, unless anyone wants to ask a more specific question?
BATTERY:
The battery is also impressive. After 12 hours of letting it sit in its case and at least 10 hours of playing with it (at about 25% brightness, power saver mode) it was only at 63% battery life. I had to set the brightness to as high as I could bear and turn it on the highest power consumption setting, and play an MMO for a few hours before it finally got to 15% and it told me I might want to think about charging it soon. (I obliged, which is why I'm writing this review.) I've been charging it for I think a little less than an hour now and it's gone from 14% to 37%. 23% in an hour? For a machine like this, I think that's pretty impressive.
INTERNET BROWSER:
Good stuff, good stuff. It moves nice and quickly to the next page once you click something, and there are tabs. I'll add more once I've selectively used the browser more. Too busy playing with all my new apps! And on that note...
APP STORE:
It's not THE App Store. You should be aware of that. However it has all the big-name games from the Apple App Store, and sometimes, the same ones you have to pay for on the iTunes store are free on the Android market. There are sections for Free apps, Paid apps, and you can select your preferred type of app, just like in the iTunes market. The selection isn't as poor as people claim, in fact, there are a whole lot of apps already there, and it's only going to get bigger.
FLASH:
It has Flash! Built right in! I can access web pages now that I never could with an iDevice. Personally, that's a pretty considerable selling point.
CAMERA:
Now for the other type of flash. The Prime has two cameras, one rear-facing and one that looks right at you. The rear-facing one has flash capabilities; The front one doesn't. I don't know why you'd need to use the front-facing one save for Skyping and such anyway, so the flash isn't a big deal. The front camera doesn't have the same impressive quality as the back one, as well. The back camera, however, surprised me. A lot. After a few shots with it I quickly discovered that the camera on this tablet is of a higher quality than my actual camera, the likes of which is solely devoted to taking pictures. Indeed, the Prime's camera surpasses a device made for taking pictures. The quality really stands out, it's crisp and clean and if you're a good cameraman anyway that will only help with making it truly shine.
The camera software itself has a lot of little settings that I haven't had the chance to play around with yet, but there is a button readily available that lets you switch from back to front cameras just by clicking it. The Prime's camera also takes video- Very nice quality video. Of course, taking pictures or video with a 10-inch tablet is a bit cumbersome and looks rather silly, but the quality that it provides makes it worth it.
INCLUDED APPS:
The Prime comes with a page (and then a few more) of pre-installed apps. They're pretty standard but they also have apps like the Kindle store already included, which I thought was nice. If you already have a Kindle account, you can log in on that app and all your books will be there for you to read. On that note, readability is nice, and you can resize the font to big or normal-sized.
There was also an app called Polaris Office, which upon opening I discovered that it had access to every single file on my Prime, much like how you can look at your folders and files on the computer. On the top right, there is a 'Create New' option, which reveals nothing short of the ability to create Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets. Anyone who needs these things for work will appreciate that this comes built in. Any other applications you want to ask about, please go ahead.
BOTTOM-OF-SCREEN-MENU-BUTTON:
Because I'm not sure what else to call it. This little button allows you to, once you click it, see your battery life, power settings, Bluetooth options, screen-tilt options, another button to lead you to the main Settings window, and a personal favorite, a notifications section. This will tell you of any new events that happened on your tablet (or if you have Facebook, if someone has replied to a comment, etc) such as the completion of a new app download. On the bottom of your screen is also a thin black bar that shows when each separate download is occurring, and you can click the little download icons to see the status of each download. These disappear once your download is finished and go to the 'event' section of your menu. Downloads usually happen in a matter of seconds, but can take a few minutes if you're downloading a particularly large application or update. All in all very convenient.
MULTITASKING SIDEBAR:
This little sidebar starts off as a button, but when you press it, it reveals a sidebar with every window and application you have open on your tablet. You can click the icon of any of them to instantly switch to that application, or you can click the X on the side of them to close the application completely. I've yet to have any problems with the Prime slowing down from too many applications, but I usually try to X them out in groups when I remember that I haven't done so yet.
SIZE/WEIGHT:
This thing is LIGHT. It's a 10-inch tablet, but it's probably a third lighter than the Kindle Fire, an 8-incher.(or is it 7? Regardless.) In an effort to find a fairly standard item to compare it with, I would have to say as follows: It's lighter than what I consider a standard-sized hardcover novel, (In this case The Da Vinci Code, about 454 pages and bound rather nicely) not by much but still a noticeable difference. Coupled with the Kindle app you could read a thick hardcover novel for cheaper than the hardcover's asking price and it'll weigh less, too.
Comparing it with my trusty copy of The Da Vinci Code again, it's about a half-inch longer than a 'standard' hardcover novel on each side. It appears to be about a pencil-width thick if not a bit less, however it slopes in at the edges so I can't quite tell. In short, this tablet is both impressively thin and incredibly light.
ALL IN ALL:
For all of you still waiting for your Prime to arrive from Amazon, Bestbuy (where mine actually eventually came from, I admit), Gamestop, or wherever else this was available for pre-ordering, I assure you, this is very worth it. It has its bugs at the moment but I've already received updates that download very quickly. (As a note, downloads do for the most part happen very quickly!) I'm very impressed with this tablet, and hope that you are too. If you haven't preordered this yet I highly recommend you do; You won't regret it.
If there's anything here I haven't addressed yet, please feel free to ask about it. I'll answer as best I can. I'll also be editing this with new information as I find it.