New Toy, First Impressions
I've just bought a second-hand HP Stream 7 tablet as a bon voyage present to myself before I fly off to Japan at the beginning of next month.
I've tried a couple of tablets in the past (an Android loaner and a Blackberry Playbook) but couldn't get on with them. The Stream 7 runs full-fat Windows 8.1 OS and it was a lot easier for me to make things work on it coming off using Windows for the past thirty-odd years plus being an early adopter of Windows 8. It was quite easy to set up a Wifi connection after firing up my wifi router (which announces itself to the student-occupied flats around me as a TV Licencing detector van) and connecting to my local network and accessing the shares on my main machine only required me to enter a username and password.
I've installed my favourite video player, CCCP on it and that works as well as the one on my desktop PC allowing for the smaller display (1280x720) compared to my desktop 4k monitor. More experimentation to come; next thing is to see if I can get cabled Ethernet working using a spare Ethernet USB dongle and an OTG cable I have handy. A lot of the places I'll be staying (hotels, hostels etc.) in Japan have good cabled Internet but indifferent Wifi.
Downsides -- The Stream 7 does not have GPS and the rear camera is not that good at only 2MPixels and no stabilisation.
Upsides -- it has a microSD card slot which will accept a 128GB device according to some blogs which means storage expansion is not a problem.
EDIT: it works perfectly well with a USB thumbdrive and a USB keyboard. What I'd like to do is to be able to charge it through a USB hub with a kbd and mouse and network adapter. More experimenting later.
EDIT 2: It works with a wired Ethernet USB adaptor I had to hand, after a bit of tapdancing to get it to accept unsigned drivers since this adapter is somewhat ancient and predated signed drivers. I'm impressed the way sixty quid's worth of tablet PC is keeping up with what I'm throwing at it. I do have the advantage of knowing a lot about Win 8 and being able to find stuff on the Internet when I need to, like the exact sequence of operations needed to use unsigned drivers on Win 8.
I've tried a couple of tablets in the past (an Android loaner and a Blackberry Playbook) but couldn't get on with them. The Stream 7 runs full-fat Windows 8.1 OS and it was a lot easier for me to make things work on it coming off using Windows for the past thirty-odd years plus being an early adopter of Windows 8. It was quite easy to set up a Wifi connection after firing up my wifi router (which announces itself to the student-occupied flats around me as a TV Licencing detector van) and connecting to my local network and accessing the shares on my main machine only required me to enter a username and password.
I've installed my favourite video player, CCCP on it and that works as well as the one on my desktop PC allowing for the smaller display (1280x720) compared to my desktop 4k monitor. More experimentation to come; next thing is to see if I can get cabled Ethernet working using a spare Ethernet USB dongle and an OTG cable I have handy. A lot of the places I'll be staying (hotels, hostels etc.) in Japan have good cabled Internet but indifferent Wifi.
Downsides -- The Stream 7 does not have GPS and the rear camera is not that good at only 2MPixels and no stabilisation.
Upsides -- it has a microSD card slot which will accept a 128GB device according to some blogs which means storage expansion is not a problem.
EDIT: it works perfectly well with a USB thumbdrive and a USB keyboard. What I'd like to do is to be able to charge it through a USB hub with a kbd and mouse and network adapter. More experimenting later.
EDIT 2: It works with a wired Ethernet USB adaptor I had to hand, after a bit of tapdancing to get it to accept unsigned drivers since this adapter is somewhat ancient and predated signed drivers. I'm impressed the way sixty quid's worth of tablet PC is keeping up with what I'm throwing at it. I do have the advantage of knowing a lot about Win 8 and being able to find stuff on the Internet when I need to, like the exact sequence of operations needed to use unsigned drivers on Win 8.