The Official 'Let Us Emote' Thead.

[ExtremeRyno]

It's been a fair amount of time for everyone to form some feelings with their A700. You've seen my written review, and a rehash: Overall I'm pleased...But...

Last night with the thoughts of the upcoming Nexus 7 and the benchmarks I've seen....I admit, I had some buyers remorse about the A700. It just feels so sluggish to me, and I was seriously thinking of returning it to Amazon and putting my money on a Nexus 7 and wildly spending the leftover money on a weekend of fun.

Then again, I'm sure that in the upcoming weeks there will be an update to the A700's firmware and it will fix some of the minor annoyances I'm having with it..Then there will undoubtedly be some custom ROMS floating around shortly after. Plus, I'm LOVING the screen. Reading on this is a pleasure, and my tiny comic supply is unbelievable on it. I love using the emulators and hooking this up to the TV. There are so many plusses and so few problems...Yet I'm still doubting.

I'm still on the ropes about it...Unfortunately until someone Nandroids the stock firmware, I'm not going to be able to do any returning...I've rooted and have CWM already done...

Anyone else feeling the same?

 

[Icebike]

Most of the sluggishness went away when I applied all the speed hints posted here.

I still have one Sluggish game (Phase 10) but I think its just because the programmer developed this for a single core machine, and hasn't updated it to take advantage of dual core or quad core. It was also slower on the A500 than it was on a phone. I think it gets stuck in that 500mhz 5th core and never gets the speed advantage of multiple cores.

The most annoying feature is the missed-first-tap bug. Drives me nuts.

But the Nexus 7 is more like a Kindle Fire or a Color Nook than a general purpose tablet. Its designed for you to consume movies and music and magazines, and other paid services more than it is designed to be a general purpose tablet.

Overall, I'm very happy with mine, and won't be buying the Nexus.

But I too hope there is some speed improvements still in the pipe line.

 

[Captain_Crypto]

I've had the A700 for about a week. I can't say I'm totally happy with my purchase decision yet but overall I like the tablet. My biggest complaint is the lag I see in some things, but it's not consistent. Sometimes there is lag, sometimes there isn't. For example, scrolling a document while in Polaris Office will sometimes stutter, and other times it's smooth.

Then there is an issue I'm having with browsers. Chrome, Boat Browser and Dolphin HD all are not a good experience for me, each being slow and unresponsive at times. Oddly enough, the native browser is fast, snappy, and the best of them all for watching videos online. This is why I'm thinking it is an ICS issue more than a hardware problem. It's as if the tablet needs a tweak in software - drivers? - to get it to work well with ICS.

The good things far outweigh the bad for me right now: the screen is incredible, with beautiful resolution and a nice picture when the brightness is not on auto (which is way too dim). Battery life has been great with moderate to heavy use (including video watching although not the entire time). I believe I made it through two days before I had to recharge (without turning it off at night). However, Badass Battery is telling me that WiFi is eating a lot of battery. I can see it since the WiFi range is not as great as my Bionic. The signal drops quite a bit when I go upstairs with the tablet, whereas my Bionic still gets near full signal strength. The tablet is blazing fast on the Internet, especially with downloads where I get nearly the full 25/25 of my FiOS service.

I'm going to keep this tablet. It's going to be a workhorse for me so I need it to be good and reliable. Then again, I haven't rooted it yet but I almost certainly will after the first update that eventually hits, and I'll ROM it as well provided that I can get the bootloader unlocked. I had the OG Droid and I hacked the crap out of it, and I'll probably do the same with the A700 eventually.

I'll be patient and wait for the updates. If it turns out this tablet doesn't meet my expectations I'll probably go with another tablet some day when I can afford it.

 

[Icebike]

Badass battery is pretty much a joke. I deleted it, you can't really rely on it.

As for WIFI bars, forget about them, there is no standard for what bars mean. Get wifi analyzer from the market.

My battery EASILY lasts two days.

Sent from my HOX

 

[ExtremeRyno]

Yeah, my battery is lasting a damn long time, too...I'm really happy with battery life. I agree with Crypto's assessment of the sluggishness. The worst part to have lag for me was the launcher: sometimes it would stutter between screens, other times it would just snap over. Same with the app drawer. At this time, everything is running off the internal SD so I can't blame it on that. As for browsers, I'm seeing pretty good speeds and quality from Dolphin. There are a few apps that I've really been looking forward to using but turn out incompatible with the A700 at this time.

I used it last night to download MP3s from YouTube and add tags...I know I can do that on my NookColor, but I guess I'm officially addicted to the 10 inch screen. I'm keepin' it.

 

[Icebike]

Extreme :
Did you shut off the Ring in settings?
And set Font size Normal under Settings / Display
And turn off Large text under Settings / Accessibility?

Once I did all of those steps all stuttering disappeared.

(this does not affect the lock screen ring).

Sent from my HOX

 

[ExtremeRyno]

AHH! Thanks for that tip! I had reset the font under display, but not in Accessibility...Weird that the fonts would make that large of a difference, but it seriously worked.

 

[Captain_Crypto]

Extreme :
Did you shut off the Ring in settings?
And set Font size Normal under Settings / Display
And turn off Large text under Settings / Accessibility?

Once I did all of those steps all stuttering disappeared.

(this does not affect the lock screen ring).

Sent from my HOX

Thanks for this. It works!

 

[ExtremeRyno]

First World Problems:

The screen is too awesome. I randomly download movies from YouTube (I just hate bringing my DVDs to school.) and decided to toss some on my A700 this afternoon. I've actually viewed them with my students using my work laptop and projector which runs in 1024x768, and they're passable as TV quality. On my A700, it's like watching a big blobby mess of pixels when stretched to fit the screen.

Now I'm actually going to have to rip the movies myself from my DVDs. ::sigh::

Not a complaint..Just an observation that I've been too lazy with my movie ripping.