I cannot reccomend RCA tablets

In December I bought an RCA tablet. It was the 7 inch Voyager 2 Pro and was purchased in December from Walmart. No fault of Walmart what subsequently transpired.

The tablet came with a keyboard case. The keyboard was a delight to use. The problems with the tablet were minimal. It was fast, had sufficient storage and worked well. The keyboard was at a very strange angle. With the keyboard level, reading the screen was somewhat hard due to its narrow viewing angle. A few apps wouldn't work on it. The screen was low resolution and didn't have a great color gamut.

Then on the 20th of March, the USB charger port worked loose. It had been getting gradually sloppier and sloppier. It stopped charging the tablet totally. As it was under manufacturer warranty, I contacted RCA. They responded - eventually - with a series of very confusing emails. It transpired they wanted me to spend $10 to ship their incompetently constructed hardware back to them. They promised to ship me back - not a new purple tablet but a reconditioned black tablet. Basically they would be shipping me a tablet somebody else had rejected or had failed to keep their payments up on.

So, because RCA is incompetent in their construction, they want me to pay $10 to ship their junk back to them. No - no way. I am not throwing $10 of good money away after $50 wasted on trash.

That set me thinking. I spent $90 on a Nook Color. That let me down, embarrasingly, in public. At a time when they were going on eBay for $75 I listed it and got the princely sum of $26 for it. Way under the going rate. I took it just to get shot of the bloody thing.

Then I bought a $50 RCA 7 inch tablet with 8GB storage. That was so worthless I threw it in the closet and spent $100 on a reconditioned Nexus 7. That worked reasonably well but stopped working about 12 months later. I did the factory reset which was when I discovered the factory image was missing. It had bricked itself!

Looking around I found lots of people that allegedly fixed tablets. None would reflash my Nexus 7. I don't have a good enough internet connection out in the sticks to download the gigabytes of data needed to fix it. It went in the closet.

So, next was the latest RCA disaster area. By now I have spent $290 on tablets and regained $26. Basically I have spent the $269 of an iPad mini and had nothing but frustration.

It is looking increasingly as though Android tablets of whatever price are just throwaway devices. As soon as they go wrong, throw them away. It's not as simple as that though. All data stored on them can be restored after deletion. With villains so easily undeleting data, the only way to ensure data security is to destroy the device.

So, I could spend $10 more on my RCA junk AND run the risk of somebody stealing my data. I don't think I'll bite on that one!

Whre to go from here? Well, there are 3 options:
1. Fix my laptop (it probably needs a new battery) and say "stuff tablets".
2. Buy a new junk tablet and hope it will last longer.
3. Stretch my finances, say "stuff it" and buy an iPad mini.

From my experience, it seems the weak point on the Android junk is the USB charger. All of my tablets and my phone have USB charging ports. All the USB ports have failed. My phone is now charged solely via a cordless charging pad. My Nexus 7 USB was getting very loose. The latest RCA tablet has probably got broken solder connections. This is why Apple uses their Lightning connector.

The reason why we have crappy USB connectors is because the EU wanted a standard power connector to reduce electronic waste. It actually causes more electronic waste because when the flimsy USB connector fails, the device is thrown away. It's just too expensive to repair them.

This leaves me blogging with just my phone and a bluetooth keyboard. It's not a happy state of affairs. I am not happy! Given that my Nexus 4 Android phone is complaining of memory issues, I  suspect it is not long for the road either.

Clearly I'm going to have to go forward from here. The solution might be an iPad mini and simply replace my phone when it dies - probably with a flip phone. Each time I buy a smartphone, I swear I will go back to a flip phone. Give that nobod ever calls me, that might well be the way forward. As far as the tablet, I'm not sure that I wouldn't be better just fixing my laptop and not bothering with a tabet. Perhaps just get a cheap Chromebook.

Jim Bean meets Alcoholics Anonymous

I seem to do this fairly regularly with a lot of Android apps. Today was the day I dumped my Twitter app. Thank heavens that I don't actually have to pay for Android apps. Twitter just got on my tits again because of its continual censorship of my tweets. Certainly I still have Twitter with its auto posts whenever I post a blog entry but I took the app itself off my tablet. I was so tired of writing a carefully considered and witty response to things people said only to have the Twitter app refuse to send it.

Years ago, I refused to pay money for any Windows software because it was just plain awful. I have yet to see any Windows software that is actually worth paying for. Look at Windows itself - so riddled with bugs that Microsoft has to come out with fixes every few days. Windows is a product that never ever gets out of beta testing stage. When Microsoft finds it has such a mess that it cannot possibly fix it any more and have it actually work properly, they release a new version with all new bugs and holes. It's absolutely the same with bought Windows software. After buying Windows software a few times and finding it never actually worked, I quit throwing money away on it and went for the free versions instead. They stood the same chance of not working but at least they were free.

Move on a few years and I went Mac and what a relief that was - none of this constant update and fix bullshit. I had the same Mac for 8 years without an issue - until the battery died. Of course, being electronic, replacing the battery is something you just don't do. Many times I've found electronics just don't last much longer than the battery. My first experience of this was a pocket calculator. The batteries died so I replaced them and a few weeks later the calculator did too. The experience has been true so many times that these days I just refuse to buy batteries for anything electronic because like as not, it'll just die.

So, I'm currently an Android tablet only user. This is, I believe, my 4th Android tablet since 2012. They're not worth throwing a lot of money at because they don't last too long either. My first tablet was a refurbished Nook Color and that was a complete piece of trash. In the end I sold the damned thing on eBay for not very much, about 5 months after I bought it. My next tablet was an RCA 7 inch with 8GB. That was pretty awful and after 6 months I ended up just giving it away. After that I bought a refurbished Nexus 7 which conked out after 14 months. It needed a factory reset so I gave it a factory reset and found the repair partition had been erased (not by me). That led to my current Android tablet (an RCA 7 inch with 16GB). It really is not worth spending money on electronic crap - it just doesn't last much longer than a bottle of Jim Bean at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention.

Perhaps my biggest gripe about tablets is the lack of connectivity to cameras such as my existing Canon XT, to mass storage and to printers. The cloud is all well and good but there are areas where the sun shines. I want to be able to load photos on my tablet from my camera, play with them in a photo processing package and then upload to a mass storage device without having to piddle about with the internet. Let's just face it - I live in an old bus. How much internet do you think I actually get in my old bus? How much do you want to bet that I'm willing to burn through my 5GB a month of data on my phone uploading photos to the cloud? This is why we need a local storage option and local photo processing option on Android tablets.