Android
So, last year during that whole "HP TouchPad fire sale" craze, I bought a TouchPad. I unboxed it, I set it up, created profiles, downloaded popular apps available.
Then I let it sit there. For months. It was never going to get better on its own either, since WebOS development has been completely abandoned. It would just keep sitting there, unable to do anything useful.
Recently I played with Shelly's phone, which has been updated to the new "Ice Cream Sandwich" or ICS version of Android. It's a shiny new OS, and I thought it'd be fun to try out and compare to iOS, if only I could.
Then I realized that I could. My friends Brendan and Lydia loaded CyanogenMod, a homebrewed Android variant that runs on all kinds of devices, onto their Nook Tablet. It runs the new ICS, which has so many Internet-connected widgets that even if you never used the thing as a tablet you could mount it on the wall and use it as a clock that also showed world news, email activity, and whatever else you wanted it to. I figured, could I do the same with my TouchPad?
I could. OMG SHINY.
The thing is fast too. This was going to be HP's flagship product last summer so its CPU is as fast as modern smartphones, and ICS supports things like hardware accelerated video.
I can watch Netflix on this thing, in HD, and it's smooth as butter! Since it's battery-powered and streaming wirelessly it feels like a little portable TV I can carry around. When I'm done I can use it for speedy web surfing or running any of the bajillion apps available for Android, and I can set up widgets galore to tell me the state of the world right from the "desktop".
This thing is suddenly the bargain-priced miracle tablet I'd hoped I was getting originally. It didn't cost me anything beyond the $150 I'd already spent last fall. And it makes me instantly like Android so much I'm wondering if my next phone will be an Android phone, despite my until-now iPhone loyalty.
So, that's the story of how I avoided studying for the bar last weekend. :P