Sunday, October 24, 2010

WeeeeeeeeTAB!

Finally, the device I've been waiting for all this time is out. I've been following the WeTab news ever since I first heard about it. Having dealt with a lot of Apple devices before I was hoping to find a system that was designed with an Open mindset.

At a first look, some of the features of the device did disappoint me while others made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Having had the chance to play around with my dad's IPad I've had a chance to compare the two devices.

WEIGHT and HEAT
First off, the WeTab (the 3G enabled one) is definitely bulkier than the IPad (the non 3G one). It has vents on the top and bottom that blow out warm air while the IPad has no visible ventilation routes. The Wetab heats up just a little but doesn't reach unbearable heat, the Ipad however does not heat up to the same extent of the WeTab.

SOFTWARE
The WeTab software is not as resilient as that of the IPad. For me that is not such a big issue since most open systems are community supported and will suffer due to the lack of a defined QA procedure (that's not to say that I know how Apple does its QA but I assume that organizations in general are bound to do a lot more checking than would hobbyist networks). For a normal user, IPad is the way to go, it is more presentable and was designed to be easily useable (atleast as long as you stay within the predefined user capabilities box).

WETAB INITITALIZATION
The install took a while and required that the machine connect to a Wifi network. Also configuring the Pinwand toolbar took forever, I was beginning to the think that the machine had hung.

Finally things were on their way. One step I did forget to mention is that you will have to register before the machine initializes itself and that the password you select becomes your user account's password which you will find quite useful should you ever start playing around with your terminal console (sudo).

Well, being a person that loves to get right under the hood, the first question I had was: how do I launch the Terminal Console. (WeTab run's Meego, a handheld flavor of Linux which I have not had much time to explore yet).

To get the Terminal console running you will have to start up the WeTab Market application which is WeTab's iStore double. There you can go to the Tools Category and choose to install the Terminal App ( it has an icon that says Root, my WeTab is not with me as I write but I'm just dumping what I remember and will take time to clean this up later). You might want to install Adobe Reader and Chrome as well since those will come in handy. I should like to find something nicer for Reading on the Wetab, the Adobe Reader just doesn't make the reading experience as nice as it is on the IPad. I'm optimistic that something out there can fit on the underlying linux system and better the experience.

Well, I haven't had much time to explore yet but I've already thought up a couple of things I'd like to try out. Most resources at the time are in German, very few are in English. I will try to put as much detail here that could be of use to other's experimenting with their WeTab's.

Here is the first article to catch my attention regarding doing cool things with the WeTab:
http://tablet-faq.de/wetab-forum/anleitung-windows-7-wetab-installieren-dual-boot-wetab-os-windows-7-a-355.html

The author discusses running Windows 7 on the WeTab Dual-booting it with the current Meego system. I haven't had much time to try this out yet; my thoughts were more along the lines of installing Ubuntu since it already offers a lot of programs that I find terribly useful (Readers/Dosbox/FireFox...etc.) and is still Open.

OTHER NICE FEATURES
USB connectivity makes dealing with the device a lot easier. You can copy files and access them directly off of a USB stick, hook-up a keyboard and mouse, and do most anything else you can think of that can be done through USB connectivity.

HDMI
There is a mini HDMI slot that allows you to take the output to a nice High Def Output. (Or so I would assume, haven't messed around with that yet.)

I will report more once I've had more time to experiment, this is only my second day with the lovable device, so another few days and I'll be sure to have something more interesting to report.


Cheers :)

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