What's wrong with the Maylong?
August 11, 2011 9:46 PM   Subscribe

A little while back, Ars Technica did a review of the $99 Maylong Android tablet and suggested that it was not good for much of anything, questioning if it was one of the worst gadgets ever.

Excerpt:
Maylong’s website doesn’t specify any details about the non-user-replaceable battery, but does say that it has a standby time of 2-3 hours. That’s not usage time, folks: that’s how long the thing will last in your bag after you unplug it, and according to our use, it’s a pretty good estimate. If you charge it before leaving for the airport, there’s a pretty good likelihood that the M-150 will be dead by the time you get on the plane.
The Best Buy Blog took issue with this wholly negative perception and showcased some of the many possibilities.
posted by SpacemanStix (83 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Got me with that one. I'd read the Ars write-up and was prepared for BB to actually defend the thing.

On the other hand, 99 bucks is a good deal for a doorstop/bookmark/serving tray combination.
posted by Ickster at 10:03 PM on August 11, 2011 [4 favorites]


Needs more cocaine.
posted by pompomtom at 10:05 PM on August 11, 2011 [3 favorites]


Best Buy blog was surprisingly hilarious!
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 10:12 PM on August 11, 2011


Long time.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 10:13 PM on August 11, 2011


Amazing. Walgreen's is actually going to sell a "tech" product worse than Paper Jamz. This is me truly amazed.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 10:18 PM on August 11, 2011


Best Buy sucks. Overpriced, crappy 'protection plans', etc.
posted by delmoi at 10:21 PM on August 11, 2011


How does it make (economic) sense to build lots of this unit, enough lots such that there's a review of one of the units, if it is so completely shit?

I'm really interested in who/what-kind-of-who takes washes like this.
posted by porpoise at 10:24 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]


WAIT WAIT WAIT. A SHITTY ANDROID TABLET? STOP THE PRESS!
posted by entropicamericana at 10:26 PM on August 11, 2011 [13 favorites]


Best Buy blog was surprisingly hilarious!

what's crazier is that the comments are mostly funny, too. how can this be?
posted by mexican at 10:31 PM on August 11, 2011


How does it make (economic) sense to build lots of this unit, enough lots such that there's a review of one of the units, if it is so completely shit?

I guess it'd be okay if you kept it plugged in? I mean, it defeats the purpose of the thing, but it could work as a sort of quasi-landline...
posted by Sys Rq at 10:32 PM on August 11, 2011


That most troubling aspect?

Precious natural resources are being blatantly wasted on a most ineffectual micro-electronic device.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 10:39 PM on August 11, 2011 [14 favorites]


The Apple fan boi hate is powerful in here. {/}

----
Posted from my iPhone, please excuse typos.
posted by LordSludge at 10:42 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]


The "Sexy Grandma" mug was a nice touch. Well done BB.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 10:44 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]


"How does it make (economic) sense to build lots of this unit, enough lots such that there's a review of one of the units, if it is so completely shit?"

(Number_sold * $_markup) - ((Number_returned * $_cost) + $_overhead) = $_profit

That's a formula that works at every interface along the supply chain, from the manufacturer to the retail sale point. The only loser is Grandma, who paid $99 for it, and Little Billy who really wanted an iPad but who won't ask for the receipt to return it because that will disappoint Grandma more.

That said, if I had $99 I'd totally buy one of these. If you can install your own apps and get it to talk RS-232, I can think of one or two potentially interesting uses.
posted by Pinback at 10:44 PM on August 11, 2011 [3 favorites]


Wait, wait, wait, stop the presses. Best Buy is now funny? I mean, that was all pretty damn clever.

Now have them show me what I can do with some of their overpriced HDMI cables and their extended warranty plans.
posted by jabberjaw at 10:51 PM on August 11, 2011


How does it make (economic) sense to build lots of this unit, enough lots such that there's a review of one of the units, if it is so completely shit?

It doesn't cost all that much to build these things, especially if your build quality is crap and you're using the night shift at a factory that normally makes cheap cellphones or netbooks or whatever, and the software is free. Toss them in enough stores and you can pick up customers who don't know what they're buying or who are thrilled to be getting "the latest gadget" at such a low price. Think about parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles with kids/grandkids/nieces/nephews who have been begging them for an iPad; here's almost the same thing for just $99. Never underestimate the worldwide market for shit.
posted by zachlipton at 10:55 PM on August 11, 2011 [7 favorites]


Think about parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles with kids/grandkids/nieces/nephews who have been begging them for an iPad; here's almost the same thing for just $99. Never underestimate the worldwide market for shit.

So it's like this generation's equivalent of Mega Blocks? Surefire way to ruin a Christmas morning.
posted by _frog at 11:00 PM on August 11, 2011 [10 favorites]


As an always-on display device with a couple of big programmed buttons, it'd work fine. Tons of home automation uses. As a doorbell for a dorm floor, for example, where the buttons show the photos and names of the residents, and whether they're in (light on and/or motion in their room) or out. Press the button for your friend and it will alert him/her to your presence.

A "where's the cat" display that shows a map of your house and where your cats are, as detected by RFID devices.

If you're a small company that has a fleet of vehicles (plumbers or glaziers for example), have a panel that shows where each vehicle is by address, and press on that button to get a map of its previous location, current location, and destination.

An order-up display for a fast food joint. Process progress indicators for a factory. Etc.

There's a ton of uses for this thing - basically any simple thing that you'd want a little computer to sit there and do all the time, but where it isn't justified to spend a couple hundred bucks on a better device that's more versatile, because you only want it to do the one simple thing.

Also, it's not clear how much of its crappiness is due to crap software rather than crap hardware; it might be possible to improve its performance with software.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 11:07 PM on August 11, 2011 [11 favorites]


A lot of posters seem to be assuming that only one specific aspect of this device is crap, and the rest of it is fine. Seems a bit optimistic.
posted by ryanrs at 11:10 PM on August 11, 2011 [3 favorites]


A "where's the cat" display that shows a map of your house and where your cats are, as detected by RFID devices.

I would like to invest my life savings in your company, please.
posted by Aquaman at 11:12 PM on August 11, 2011 [57 favorites]


The small company, the fast-food joint, and the factory can all afford more than $99 worth of suck. There are Android tablets within $100 of this price point which aren't better used as doorstops, sushi plates, or doorstops with sushi on them -- I have an Archos which works just fine for development purposes, and I paid around $200 for it.
posted by vorfeed at 11:17 PM on August 11, 2011


A "where's the cat" display that shows a map of your house and where your cats are, as detected by RFID devices.

A sort of... cat scanner?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:17 PM on August 11, 2011 [38 favorites]


I have no idea how these people got their RFIDs wedged into their cats, or why...
posted by vorfeed at 11:20 PM on August 11, 2011 [13 favorites]


There's a ton of uses for this thing

I think this kind of assumes that it works at all. If you're going to take it down to the bare metal and write a bunch of code, and the hardware is sufficiently functional to support whatever you're doing, well, you might could do something with it. I humbly submit that by that time you've invested so much time and energy that your hundred-dollar unit cost isn't saving you much, and your end result is probably still pretty lousy.
posted by brennen at 11:21 PM on August 11, 2011 [5 favorites]


So is this better or worse than the TwitterPeek?
posted by That's Numberwang! at 11:24 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]


That looks pretty terrible but worst gadget ever? Eh, probably not. That list is really long. Maybe worst this year, but I bet it's not even really the worst Android gadget this year.

Virtual Boy. Cue Cat. ZIP disks. Any number of those toy pseudo-computers over the years. Pre-recorded music on proprietary formats, as sold more than once in toy stores. The Power Glove sucked pretty bad, speaking of toys. How about the Jaguar? IBM PS/1 and PS/2. Any computer with the processor or other upgrades on proprietary boards.

I once happily used an old surplus CRT dumb terminal for about a year as my primary BBS connection. It designed by someone with a fetish for the movie Brazil and a sadistic taste in keyboard design that made most known chiclet or button keyboards feel comfortable. Some nerd friends of mine bought a small vanload of them so they could install them all over their house.

People have spent twice the cost of that tablet on crappy little 16k or less phone organizers or gimmicky watches at such a late technological age it just didn't make any damn sense. Or just a laser pointer. People used to happily spend hundreds of dollars on what is now a common less-than 5MW laser you can get for a dollar today just 'cause it was shiny and new back then. Ooo. A laser.
posted by loquacious at 11:24 PM on August 11, 2011 [5 favorites]


One, two, three, four - I declare the need for a government intervention war!
posted by onesidys at 11:29 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]


One, two, three, four - I declare the need for a government intervention war!

What am I missing here?
posted by brennen at 11:30 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]


But lasers were cool and laser pointers did things no other device could do. These tablets are just especially shitty versions of a common product.
posted by ryanrs at 11:31 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]


Hell, before laser pointers, people used sticks to point to things. Fuckin' sticks, man!
posted by ryanrs at 11:36 PM on August 11, 2011 [25 favorites]


loquacious; I beg to differ on the Zip discs. They were useful, but only for a very short timespan. Cheap CD-Rs yanked the rug out from under them pretty quickly. But many's the night I spent at the college computer lab filling my Zip discs with - ahem - useful shareware programs.

You're right on the pre-recorded music thingies in the toy store, though. I almost doubled over laughing first time I saw one a few years ago. One storage device held about two minutes of music, meaning that the songs had to be cut shorter. The price for one shortened song was about 1/3 the price of a full-price CD of the same artist.
posted by Harald74 at 11:38 PM on August 11, 2011 [4 favorites]


Cue Cat.

That has a lot of uses. Well, it did until smart phones could read bar codes. It used to have a pretty big cult following for those who wanted to hack it. Big for a gadget anyway, and mostly after it was out of production, but still ...
posted by krinklyfig at 11:42 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]


I just threw out my cue cat this year.
posted by BrotherCaine at 11:50 PM on August 11, 2011


I beg to differ on the Zip discs. They were useful, but only for a very short timespan

You got that right. Man, I hated Iomega so much after buying one of their Zip drives ... It worked for approximately two weeks, clicked the click of death and dutifully destroyed every Zip disk that it encountered from that moment on. Pisses me off just thinking about it.
posted by krinklyfig at 11:50 PM on August 11, 2011 [4 favorites]


Hell, before laser pointers, people used sticks to point to things. Fuckin' sticks, man!

Cats will not, in most circumstances, go comically apeshit over a stick.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:52 PM on August 11, 2011 [17 favorites]


Sure they will, you just have to keep poking them.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:57 PM on August 11, 2011 [18 favorites]


It is unfortunate that it doesn't have replaceable batteries. You could use it as battery discharger.
Awe. Some.
posted by dg at 12:11 AM on August 12, 2011 [4 favorites]


I just threw out my cue cat this year.
posted by BrotherCaine at 11:50 PM on August 11


I'm pretty sure my Cue Cat survived my move and is still in my "electronics box." That said, I have no idea why I kept the thing. I got it as a trade show freebie and never found a use for it. Somehow I was never expecting it to come up in a thread here. Actually, I never expected the topic to ever come up again anywhere or anytime. Live and learn.
posted by sardonyx at 12:12 AM on August 12, 2011


I used the cue cat for a while, and was thinking about cobbling together some kind of book &/or CD inventory/tracking system with it. Then I decided I didn't care and there'd probably be an Android app soon anyway.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:26 AM on August 12, 2011


Just the other day I used a CueCat to scan all of my books for entry into LibraryThing.

I truly felt like I had gone back in time, it was awesome.
posted by cmonkey at 12:48 AM on August 12, 2011 [4 favorites]


Hell, before laser pointers, people used sticks to point to things. Fuckin' sticks, man!

Coming soon on Etsy: Vintage Steampunk Pointer Stick
posted by D.C. at 1:13 AM on August 12, 2011 [5 favorites]


I just threw out my cue cat this year.

Meow what would make you do such a thing?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:03 AM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]


All this talk of poking a cat with a stick. And cue cats. And pointing a stick at things that need to be pointed at.

And pointing a cat at things instead of a stick. And then throwing the cat out.

I thought it was a cat-poking / pool cue / cat-pointing running Metafilter gag that I wasn't privy to. Fun and games. I worked it out 3rd try.

Luddite Perthite
No Idea what a CueCat is.

posted by uncanny hengeman at 2:30 AM on August 12, 2011


Another cheap crappy android tablet. My girlfriend works for a subsidiary of bb in the uk, around 90% if not more of the android tablets sold are to people that want an iPad but don't want to spend £400 on device.
posted by adventureloop at 3:06 AM on August 12, 2011


Another cheap crappy android tablet

With almost no tablet apps to speak of, as well.

Why yes, that is a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in my pocket.

Where it falls apart for me (and likely for most people) is in the user experience surrounding software availability. I fully recognize that there isn't a ton of software available to Android tablets right now, and that Honeycomb is still an OS that most people don't have and aren't developing for, based on market numbers. This is not a problem germane to the 10.1, or any other Android tablet in particular. However, for the amount of marketing and push that these tablets are getting, there should absolutely be not only a wide range of options, but a clearly delineated path with which to reach them. Android Market has neither. You can search for "tablet", and you hit quite a few things, and you can search for "Honeycomb", and reach some others, but you have things like themes and wallpapers for phones in the Honeycomb style that make their way into your search. Apple has two sides of the App Store - iPhone and iPad - and it's completely obvious where the tablet apps are. I'm an experienced user, so I'm figuring things out, but I can't imagine someone who isn't comfortable with this stuff having much fun doing the same.

More importantly, by this point in the iPad's life cycle, there was a huge number of apps available for the platform, and I just don't feel that happening for Android tablets. Is it because there's just too much disparity in the sizes and specs? Possibly, but I think it has a lot to do with what I mentioned earlier. If consumers are returning tablets, why develop for them at all? Stick to the phones. Hence, people simply aren't finding the kind of software they expect to find when they try to download, and it's causing disappointment. I'm not talking about the geeks, rooting and playing. I'm talking about regular people for whom "unlocked bootloader" might as well be a foreign language.

posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:20 AM on August 12, 2011


With almost no tablet apps to speak of, as well.

People must be having very different experiences than I, because games are the only software I've encountered that look worse on the tablet than on my phone. FBReader, Opera, MoboPlayer, WaPedia...they all look crisp and sharp, despite not being intentionally designed for a tablet. And games are quickly being released that are optimized for tablet screen displays.
posted by cmonkey at 4:29 AM on August 12, 2011


Also, resistive touchscreens are Hitler.

You know who else was Hitler?

This meme may need extra work.
posted by jaduncan at 4:35 AM on August 12, 2011 [14 favorites]


More importantly, by this point in the iPad's life cycle, there was a huge number of apps available for the platform, and I just don't feel that happening for Android tablets. Is it because there's just too much disparity in the sizes and specs? Possibly, but I think it has a lot to do with what I mentioned earlier. If consumers are returning tablets, why develop for them at all? Stick to the phones. Hence, people simply aren't finding the kind of software they expect to find when they try to download, and it's causing disappointment. I'm not talking about the geeks, rooting and playing. I'm talking about regular people for whom "unlocked bootloader" might as well be a foreign language.

Developing software for Android tablets is not a particularly pleasant experience right now, and it takes a fair amount of work to reasonably adapt many phone apps to work well on tablets. For many applications, it's a difficult problem from a UI design perspective. On a phone, we're pretty decent at showing one screen layout at a time and navigating between them. For tablets, we have to figure out what information to present simultaneously and how to use screen space differently. Since tablets are so new, and Android tablets even newer, we have very few conventions in this area, which means a lot of this sort of thinking has to be done from scratch for each tablet app. Apple, as is their style, has been much more aggressive about establishing interface conventions and making them easy for developers to implement, while Android doesn't have a lot of established tablet design patterns yet.

From an engineering perspective, it's also a fairly involved task to convert many existing phone interfaces to good tablet interfaces, as connecting up the various parts of the interface becomes more complicated Simple example: on a phone, pressing a login button may cause the entire screen to change to a username/password entry form. On a tablet, you might want that same button to cause the form to appear in the right-side pane of the app, but only if the app is currently in landscape mode. In portrait mode, there isn't enough room for a right-side pane, so the web page should load in a popup that covers most of the screen, greying out the rest of the app underneath. Then, when login is complete, the login form, wherever it is, has to go away, and the rest of the app has to update accordingly. In all three cases, the app should do the "right thing," whatever that is, if the user hits Android's back button. Repeat this process for every part of the app that has to open, close, or control some other part of the app, and you get a sense of what I'm talking about here.

Now many of these problems apply equally to the iPad, but Apple has a couple things working in their favor. Sheer numbers would be the most obvious: with well over 25M iPads sold, there's a lot more potential users. There are also only two iPad models, and they are largely identical from a development perspective if you're not pushing the CPU to its limits. Android tablets come from various manufacturers and have different shapes and sizes, which means developers have to accumulate a pile of devices and test their software against them all (the Android emulator is an extremely poor substitute for the real hardware). Artwork has to be adjusted to handle different screen resolutions, and interfaces have to be flexible to accommodate different aspect ratios. All this stuff is certainly doable, but it takes a lot of energy and resources for potentially small returns at this point.

Ice Cream Sandwich will supposedly help unify tablet and phone app development, which will certainly help this situation, but given Android's historic inability to get upgrades to users, it could well be an extremely long time before developers can require it for their apps. With Ice Cream Sandwich (I sure feel silly just typing that, let alone saying it out loud), it's clear that Android isn't giving up on tablets, and I'm certainly curious to see how the platform evolves.

Of course, the root problem boils down to market share and the size of the userbase, which is also nicely demonstrated by the same chart. Android 3.0-3.2 represent Honeycomb, which is what the Android tablets run (the craptastic tablet linked in this post runs 1.5, which is another reason why it's crap). Add the numbers and we see that Honeycomb's share of Android devices (technically, devices that have accessed the Market within the past 14 days, but we'll assume that is a reasonably representative figure from the point of view of developers who intend to distribute in the Market anyway) is 1.2%. That's not exactly impressive. So maybe we really should be asking why there are as many Android tablet apps as there are?
posted by zachlipton at 4:58 AM on August 12, 2011 [9 favorites]


Best Buy must be running their site off of one of these tablets. I can't get on to read this. What does it say?
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:03 AM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]


Google cache.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 5:07 AM on August 12, 2011 [4 favorites]


The comments make a good read too.
e.g. It is unfortunate that it doesn't have replaceable batteries. You could use it as battery discharger.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:41 AM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]


For $99 you can buy a bunch of Etch-A-Sketches and enjoy infinite standby time.
posted by tommasz at 5:48 AM on August 12, 2011


infinite standby time

Pfft. Typical marketing speak. With proton decay, you'll be lucky to get 1036 years of standby time on those.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:57 AM on August 12, 2011 [8 favorites]


For $99 you can buy a bunch of Etch-A-Sketches and enjoy infinite standby time.

I'd avoid. Mine has a faulty accelerometer, wipes out all my work whenever I try and use it.
posted by TheAlarminglySwollenFinger at 6:59 AM on August 12, 2011 [14 favorites]


So it's like this generation's equivalent of Mega Blocks? Surefire way to ruin a Christmas morning.
posted by _frog at 11:00 PM on August 11 [6 favorites +] [!]


I just involuntarily snarled 'Fuck you, Mega Blocks' at my screen when I read that. I thought the scars had healed decades past, but when the weather is right the wound still aches.
posted by FatherDagon at 7:23 AM on August 12, 2011 [7 favorites]


I actually have one of these, bought not from Walgreens but directly from China via eBay. It's the exact same unit, except it came with the browser home page defaulted to the Chinese edition of Google.

I bought it not expecting much and wasn't disappointed. Every criticism in the review is correct except that I didn't have their problems with the wifi or apps; I downloaded several free apps without trouble. (The one that closes all open applications is especially useful since the thing is so slow.) The battery is useless, it can't watchably play video, and the touchscreen barely works. But it was a very cheap way to play with Android and decide if I wanted to invest in a better device. I also had thoughts of breaking out the serial port and using it as a display, but I probably won't follow through.
posted by localroger at 7:26 AM on August 12, 2011


Is the BB link not working for anybody else?
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:31 AM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]


Stuff like this makes me sad the way that those knockoff plastic toys in bodegas make me sad. They always make me flash to a vision of fur-wrapped, starving epigones, asking their village elder:

So, OK, the ancients had iPads, and they were awesome. And they had the PadFone, which from the buildup it got on the ancient scrolls of CompuTex must had been AMAZEBALLS. And they had Transformers, and those do sound pretty great. But they also took oil and metals from the ground, which would never be replenished, and created toxic waste which they dumped in the sea in the creation of things that nobody wanted? Things that relied on looking like something good just to get people to buy them, and which caused nothing but disappointment? Fucking us over to have nice things I can kind of understand, but they fucked our entire planet just to feel bad about not being able to have nice things? Really?

That said, part of me is trying to think up use cases. Maybe reading RSS feeds in bed? Not much scrolling, power point always available... and then you can put it in a stand and use it as an alarm clock/electronic picture frame?

So, a shit Chumby. Yeah, I got nothing.
posted by running order squabble fest at 7:35 AM on August 12, 2011 [2 favorites]


"'Best Buy sucks.'

Is this your thing now? Best Buy as an retail entity is entirely orthogonal to the post. It's really boorish to just say something sucks in every thread."


delmoi is required to comment in every post. After a while, it gets hard to come up with original, useful, or relevant comments in the time before the next post comes along.
posted by Eideteker at 7:44 AM on August 12, 2011 [3 favorites]


Is the BB link not working for anybody else?

The site is down. By the way, I really do hate the Drupal icon.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:47 AM on August 12, 2011


If you're a small company that has a fleet of vehicles (plumbers or glaziers for example), have a panel that shows where each vehicle is by address, and press on that button to get a map of its previous location, current location, and destination.

I have a buddy that used to be CTO of a company that made fleet management software. They definitely would have loved to have a super cheap android tablet to write their truck-side software for, as I understand the devices they WERE using were... Difficult to program for.
posted by antifuse at 7:55 AM on August 12, 2011


Geez, if you're going to be making some from-the-future realtime fleet/cat/home management thing, couldn't you just spend another hundred bucks and get something that isn't called "the worst gadget of all time?"
posted by Threeway Handshake at 8:16 AM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]


I have no idea how these people got their RFIDs wedged into their cats, or why...

Many (most?) cats come with RFID pre-installed these days. Your vet can upgrade your animal if it is not compliant with the current ISO standards.
posted by endless_forms at 8:19 AM on August 12, 2011 [3 favorites]


A "where's the cat" display that shows a map of your house and where your cats are, as detected by RFID devices.

Ah, yes, there they are. Behind the refrigerator and in a cardboard box out back, respectively.
posted by Jess the Mess at 8:32 AM on August 12, 2011


You know, $99 is a lot of money for a product that is useless. Why would Walgreens sell this thing? Surely it's bad for their store? Walgreens sells lots of junk, of course, but the junk mostly at least works.
posted by Nelson at 8:33 AM on August 12, 2011


Whenever I see "Drupal" my brain automatically converts it to "Bhopal".

That's probably not a positive association.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 8:40 AM on August 12, 2011 [4 favorites]


Geez, if you're going to be making some from-the-future realtime fleet/cat/home management thing, couldn't you just spend another hundred bucks and get something that isn't called "the worst gadget of all time?"

Because if it's a fleet management device that's being plunked into a truck, all that matters is how much it costs. The branding is going to be removed (or hidden by a mounting bracket, or something), so who cares what device it is, as long as it works? (Note: this is key. :))
posted by antifuse at 8:41 AM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]


You know, $99 is a lot of money for a product that is useless. Why would Walgreens sell this thing? Surely it's bad for their store? Walgreens sells lots of junk, of course, but the junk mostly at least works.

I have no idea what the cost of stocking a product is, but given that they already have the locked case to keep the headphones and CD players and whatever else in, there's probably little downside to tossing a few of these things in as well. After all, the overlap between people who'd buy a tablet at Walgreens and people who read ArsTechnica probably isn't that great. (That said, I did buy a good set of $5 speakers at Walgreens once. Teenage me would definitely buy small electronics from Walgreens, but for anything that would have required major saving-up (e.g. a $99 tablet), I'd probably order from a catalog/online.)
posted by hoyland at 8:42 AM on August 12, 2011


barely lasts longer than a drunken fratboy in bed

And when it dies, out come the sharpies and the lipstick.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:59 AM on August 12, 2011 [3 favorites]


I have a buddy that used to be CTO of a company that made fleet management software. They definitely would have loved to have a super cheap android tablet to write their truck-side software for, as I understand the devices they WERE using were... Difficult to program for.

Strangely, Apple has a solid policy (see the app store review guidelines, which I cannot quote but will discuss since news organizations have repeated it) against using their location APIs for any kind of fleet management. I imagine this restriction comes from the Google Maps Terms of Service: "Except where you have been specifically licensed to do so by Google, you may not use Google Maps with any products, systems, or applications installed or otherwise connected to or in communication with vehicles, capable of vehicle navigation, positioning, dispatch, real time route guidance, fleet management or similar applications."

In other words, the map providers want that market for themselves. I'd also bet that Apple has little interest in the liability that comes along with fleet management stuff; since those devices are used to enforce hours of service regulations, that's a nasty lawsuit when a truck driver with a jailbroken iPad hits a school bus after driving 16 hours straight.
posted by zachlipton at 9:04 AM on August 12, 2011


The Zip Drive really wasn't a bad product. I think what happened is that Iomega wasn't able to keep the quality high as they scaled to meet demand, and that's when the click-of-death and other severe problems started. I bought a SCSI Zip drive very early (actually at the MacWorld Expo in Boston, when or soon after they were initially introduced) and it never had any problems. It probably still works if I dug it out and figured out a way to connect it.

But later Zip drives and disks? Almost total trash. The USB ones in particular seemed problematic. But if you pick one up, they also seem lighter. Much lighter. Suspiciously so, in fact; like there must have been things in the older drives that just aren't there in the newer ones.

So I don't think it's really a good comparison ... Iomega had a history of fairly good, if sometimes eclectic, hardware engineering. Their Bernoulli drives were pretty clever. The Zip became a victim of its own success, and subsequent lack of quality and lack of motivation to fix it, and this made it vulnerable to much cheaper (if somewhat less convenient) technologies in the form of CD-Rs. The Maylong tablet is a piece of shit, was a piece of shit the day it was designed, was in all probability designed by someone who knew they were designing a piece of shit, and will probably quickly become garbage. All you can hope for is that some clever hackers will come up with interesting things to do with it, and which it is better-suited for than being an actual tablet computer.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:18 AM on August 12, 2011 [3 favorites]


barely lasts longer than a drunken fratboy in bed

I think that's being very generous to the fratboy.
posted by The Deej at 9:36 AM on August 12, 2011


But many's the night I spent at the college computer lab filling my Zip discs with - ahem - useful shareware programs.

For me it was SyQuest cartridges. Another old and clunky technology from an extinct company. I think I still have a box of 44mb cartridges around here somewhere containing my collection of Fred Fish shareware for the Amiga.
posted by the_artificer at 10:13 AM on August 12, 2011


Dealing with Zip discs was heaven after futzing around with Colorado tapes. At least the failure rate with the Zips was lower than 1 in 4.
posted by bonehead at 10:59 AM on August 12, 2011


If anyone here is still using Zip discs, I have an Addonics PCMCIA drive and about 12 discs just sitting around. I was going to put them up on eBay but I can't be arsed. If you can pay postage, they're yours -- MeMail me.
posted by Shepherd at 11:19 AM on August 12, 2011


Strangely, Apple has a solid policy (see the app store review guidelines, which I cannot quote but will discuss since news organizations have repeated it) against using their location APIs for any kind of fleet management.

An interesting factor that I hadn't thought about. Though they *were* using the Bing maps API on their web client front-end, so I wonder if Microsoft doesn't have a similar clause - or if they were just flaunting it? The nice thing about Android is that you can just write your app and install it on your device (as long as your device allows sideloading). No need to go through the market at all, so in theory you could violate the hell out of that clause and only get in trouble if/when Google eventually caught you :)

Not that I'm recommending that they do that, of course, but from some of the stories I heard about the company, I'm thinking that perhaps it's not all that out of character for them.
posted by antifuse at 11:35 AM on August 12, 2011


I ordered a Maylong on Amazon. They accidentally sent me a Maybach. Which was nice.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:39 AM on August 12, 2011 [2 favorites]


SyQuest

Wow, I haven't thought about SyQuest in over a decade! Thanks for taking me back.

We used them at a video/music studio in the 90s for backups, and they were always a horrible pain in the ass. The joke we had was that the Nazis made them, and we pronounced it as "Sigh-kVest."
posted by Threeway Handshake at 12:56 PM on August 12, 2011 [2 favorites]


The Zip Drive really wasn't a bad product.

I can understand why build problems creep in to popular products which were once dependable. It's the nature of business to squeeze every last cent out of any business model which generates consistent profits. So I do try to spend money on products made with some amount of care, or at least which don't break quickly. I worked in IT for years and had to navigate around quality control issues, etc., but nearly every company no matter how dependable will produce some garbage at some point, like a line of products or one model which is a total lemon.

That said, Iomega didn't just screw up when they cut corners on Zip drives. That would be bad but forgivable by itself. They really screwed up when they refused to admit there were problems, which eventually lead to a class action lawsuit. Iomega lost. They were required to pay not in cash but in the form of vouchers for other Iomega products. Even though I qualified as part of the class, who the hell wants to roll the dice on them and their products after all that? The whole ordeal left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have never purchased anything with their brand on it since. I need to know that the company will make me whole if something goes wrong with their products, and Iomega failed to do so in a spectacular fashion. They fought for over two years in court to absolve themselves from any legal responsibility. Plus, at the time I was pretty broke and had to save for a long time to afford the drive and three Zip disks. Buying a replacement backup drive of some sort was not possible until I scrimped and saved for many more months.

From the wikipedia page:

Iomega received thousands of complaints about the click of death, but denied all responsibility — often claiming, to the fury of Zip drive owners, that the problems were caused by the use of (functionally identical) third-party media. A class action suit was filed against them in September 1998. (Rinaldi v. Iomega Corp., 41 U.C.C. Rep. Serv. 2d 1143) The case was settled in March 2001 and Zip drive owners were given a rebate toward the future purchase of an Iomega product.

FWIW, I only used Iomega Zip disks with the drive.
posted by krinklyfig at 3:40 PM on August 12, 2011


Iomega lost.

Whoops, they settled. Paid out but didn't technically lose the case.
posted by krinklyfig at 3:44 PM on August 12, 2011


the Android emulator is an extremely poor substitute for the real hardware

I have found the emulator works quite well, just as long as you are developing for a phone sized device. There are still some issues (for my app, HTC cameras are buggy across their entire range - can't exactly debug that problem with the emulator) that it can't help with though.

However, Honeycomb in the emulator is so slow they might as well not have bothered. I don't even know what my app looks like on a tablet since I can't afford one and I haven't been patient enough to wait for the Honeycomb emulator to run it.
posted by netd at 6:53 PM on August 12, 2011


What I loved about zip disks is that the publisher's girlfriend's kid could throw them against a wall and they still worked.
posted by Mike Mongo at 7:08 AM on August 13, 2011


Is this your thing now? Best Buy as an retail entity is entirely orthogonal to the post. It's really boorish to just say something sucks in every thread.

Uh, the post was about best buy, and in fact served to make best buy look good. How is my comment 'orthogonal'? Do you actually know what that word means?

Clearly the magnitude of my comment, when projected onto the vector space of the post is negative, not zero.

----

Anyway, if you could root this device it might make for a useful touchscreen interface for something simple (where it can be connected to a power source)

Also I still have my Cue:Cat in it's origional packaging
posted by delmoi at 10:24 PM on August 13, 2011


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