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And we thought the OC thread was getting bad and worn out...  

Yeah, really!

More like the OCD thread...

Monor point

Do you mean a single point or a minor point? I'm confused  

The ipad, for once, actually offers something not pre-existing. the small form factor of this tablet and fact that it's completely keyboardless was unique to the market.

Er, no. My Archos 5IT was doing this in September 2009 and it was the SECOND generation of Archos Internet Tablets (the first, from about September 2008 was almost identical but ran an Archos version of Linux while the version I have runs Android 1.6 (Donut). Archos also offered a 7" version of the original tablet in September '08...

I had the same experience in Canada - Amazon Marketplace installs and loads but purchases are blocked (including the Angry Birds Rio givewaway last week ).

I noticed Angry Birds Rio is now also available on the regular Market, for free.

Yeah... I grabbed it sometime last week  I've been busy building a fence and haven't been "DC'ing" much! Anyway, thank  you for updating that - I'd forgotten about posting it!

Screen capture for rooted androids...

Try "Shootme"

Great Scott! I was distracted by your avatar tsaint and my peripheral vision read your post as:

Screen capture for rooted hemmrhoids

So go on, shoot me 

But from the discussion, it wasn't at all clear that more expensive program A was also BETTER than cheaper program B.  That's why I asked the question. 

Ashampoo occasionally gives away the previous version of a product free of charge. More often, though, their free offerings are "LITE" versions of their paid offerings and are thus crippled in some way or ways...

I had the same experience in Canada - Amazon Marketplace installs and loads but purchases are blocked (including the Angry Birds Rio givewaway last week ).

Ooh... Curt! Think about those Yiggles! Go on, you know you want to...

Seriously, I've been cured (I think) - I've ignored all of Ashampoo's come ons for over a year now. The only Ashampoo product I still have installed is Uninstaller (latest version), but I haven't used it in ages, either... Might just get rid of it.

Of course, I *must* see what they've changed for WinOptimizer 8, software junkie that I am.

Eager to try out some of these apps, but not being a Market user, I was happy to find Android Freeware as it appears to provide a fair number of .apk files for download.

Prior to using this site, I'd been using SlideME and AndAppStore -- neither seemed to have RealCalc or ASTRO File Manager but Android Freeware did

What's your reason for not using the market?

I can think of two possible reasons: 1. ewemoa is using a non-Google approved tablet (ie one without 3g and therefore without official access to the Google Marketplace) or 2. ewemoa's only intereted in freeware and doesn't want to have to wade through the thousands of paid apps that are available on the marketplace.

Heh, heh - thanks lanux128, for necromancing this thread. Completely off-topic, but as a result of your post, I re-read my last post here (from a year ago) and noted my comment about Maxthon and possibly trying it again. I didn't wind up doing anything in the intervening 11 months or so... until this morning.

I installed Maxthon 3 and found it to be pretty slick - it still has those glorious mouse gestures. However, I have IE9 tweaked to perfection and uninstalled Maxthon after giving it a whirl... As much as I like the mouse gestures, I've learned to live without them in the last three years. None of Fx's mouse gesture add-ons come close to the Maxthon feature and I've not found a Windows application to replicate them system wide, either. C'est la vie...

Well... here goes:

Co-Pilot Live NA
Thinkfree Office Full version
Angry Birds
Angry Birds Seasons
Fruit Ninja
Battery Indicator Pro
Switch Pro Widget
JuiceDefender Ultimate
Auto Memory Manager
K9 email client
NewsRob Pro (RSS reader)
Astro File Manager
Amazon Kindle
EDIT: forgot Smart Keyboard Pro

EDIT 2: should mention that these apps are spread over two Andriod devices, one with 1.6 (Donut) and the other 2.21 (Froyo) FW. Neither of them are phones, rather they are small tablets (Archos 5A IT 32GB and Archos 43IT 16GB)...

Prices will come down - people are paying for the privilege of being early adopters right now. Look at notebooks - I still can't believe that I get aerated about $1000 for a premium notebook today when you consider that I was happy - thought I'd gotten a bargain in fact - to pay $1800 for a run of the mill Centrino notebook 7 years ago.

Superboyac raises a good point about what tablets ARE and what people think that they are. However, the problem is attributable to reviewers, pundits, and the manufacturers  - particularly the manufacturers, who are trying to define the niche at the moment. It is understandable that DC'ers might want these devices to be very powerful notebook replacements. At the other end of the spectrum you have the iPad's vision as a device for the consumption of media. The reality is that manufacturers are catering to those views and everyting in between, so there's a bit of collective schizophrenia at the moment. For example, on the geek end you've got the Toshiba Libretto W100-002 1.20GHz Tablet PC (lust, drool - played with one for about 30 minutes at a local store) and the Asus EP121 (there are Android equivalents, though - like the Notion Ink Adam) while on the conumable media end you've got the ever-evolving world of ebook readers, particularly the rootable Barnes and Noble Nook...

I don't know - it's all very Confucian (you know the curse: "may you live in interesting times"? These ARE interesting times!). It's not even so much about the tablet segment per se as it is about the rapid escalation in portable technology and the way in which functions are intersecting in one device. Is it an ebook reader? a portable music player? A PMP? An MMP? A phone? A TV? A portable computer? With the present technology I think that this is a bad thing - Jack of all trades and all that, but developments are happening so rapidly that I think that soon such "all-in-one in your pocket" devices will quickly become not only reality but indispensible...

EDIT: removed an errant line-break

For the past 15 years, snobs have been proclaiming the superiority of the Macs over Windows PCs. During that time, Windows PCs have outsold Macs by at least 10 to 1 and the ratio of available software for the platforms is even greater. Yes Macs have cachet, and if you are in one of a very few fields (graphic arts or publishing), they might possibly be a better choice. Apple is laughing all the way to the bank while the fanboys pony up for style over substance, but in the real world, most of us prefer Windows (or Linux), and the numbers reflect that.

I think the same will happen with tablets. You can have an iPad which is designed to be cool in the eyes of Steve Jobs, or you will be able to choose among a variety of Android (and possibly other OS) tablets that give you what YOU want from a tablet. 

In 2 years, Android has already overtaken the iPhone, which had a 2 year head start, in smart phone sales. I expect it will take much less than 2 years for the same to happen in tablets.

I hope you're right! However, at the moment I believe that the general public perceives tablets in a "new" category (because of course they didn't exist before the iPad, right?) that is aligned more with ebook readers, smartphones, and PMPs (like the iPod Touch), rather than computers. AFAICT, in general terms Apple owns this market and WRT PMPs dominate sales. Once tablets become more useful as productivity tools (ie deviates further from Jobs' locked down vision), your prediction may prove correct (I hope it does!). While the perception of the tablet as a symbol of its owner's good taste and membership in the "in" crowd persists, it will not.

They have to be better in many ways, and people have to want to use them over an ipad.

This is the key point: cachet. Period. As I've babbled on about before, it's mostly about marketing and the public's perception. Apple is cool and hip and the rest is staid and boring. It really won't matter how good the competition is because the majority of buyers will just buy Apple...

FWIW, I forgot to mention the RIM Playbook which looks awesome as well. However, from a marketing perspective I think that they're shooting themselves in the foot by initially releasing a product that you HAVE to tether to a Blackberry device. Better to release something anyone can use and get people excited. Just my two bits.

Archos is supposedly releasing a "premium" line in the summer with pricing expected (by pundits) to remain in the $300 to $400 range for a 10 inch tablet with Honeycomd (Android 3.x), a 1.6Ghz dual core processor and 3G capability. Some have suggested that they may even offer PixelQi screens on this line. It will be interesting to see if Archos (finally) lives up to its potential. They were first out of the gate with an Android tablet (the Archos 5IT) that was well executed, though plagued by FW problems for months after its release (a secondary concern is that while the hardware is capable, thus far Archos has yet to release FW for it based on Android 2.x, which is problematic because app developers are dropping support for Android 1.6 weekly. This SUCKS given that the A5 IT was @400 when released just 18 months ago AND when you consider that Android 2.2 has been out since the summer of 2010). Their next (current) generation of tablets offfered a lot of value for the asking price, but are plagued by build quality issues, poor implementation of key features (HDMI out, for example), and hardware problems - the cameras suck, for example, and the screens vary from model to model WRT quality. They've also hobbled all the current generation of tablets with inadequate RAM (128-256MB) and ridiculously small system storage allowances (230MB) - when you've got a minimum of 8GB of onboard storage, why allocate only 230MB for applications? Anyway, if Archos overcomes the quality control issue and includes a reasonable amount of RAM to backup that awesome CPU along with realistic system storage space, they may have something worth considering.

Further, Samsung has just released their pricing on the Galaxy Tab II and it is VERY competitive for both the wi-fi only and 3G versions. Of course, this is relative...  

Anyway, my point is that the competition is heating up and we should see much more competitively priced option in the second half of 2011.

+1 for Calibre. It also converts ebooks between formats while (heh, heh) retaining document formatting. My only quibble is that installing it (or updates) and opening it are dog slow...

Here you go Carol: just hit "Alt + Shift +Control + S" and you can toggle between the dark interface and the light interface from Xara 5 and earlier...

My only negative comment is that I really don't like the new colour scheme in version 6 - which seems to have been changed (too late) to make it fit in with Vista colour schemes - personally I thing the old colour scheme is clearer and more pleasant (perhaps they can be persuaded to include a skinning or theme function in version 7).

Carol - there's a hack that enables the old colour scheme... Now, if only I could remember it! I'll dig around and post it (found it in the Xara forums when 6 came out, so should be able to find it again).

, we live in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada.
My user name is Darwin but my friends call me Mike

This one is for you, Mike:
 (see attachment in previous post)

click to enlarge to 600x800 pixels

Hey Curt! Now where d'ya dig that up? If I find out that you've been here without looking me up, I shall be annoyed! Anyway, thank you for that - quite amusing - I've seen the original sign, but not the "edited" one!

And a warm welcome to all who have joined recently - vhick, ChrisB257, Clara Listensprechen, and Gailin 

I'm glad I'm not the only one infuriated by this. IE9 no longer shows the page title in the titlebar and it's ok as long as you've only got one or two tabs.. if you've got a bunch of tabs open, it's a nightmare.

First, the companies need to stop selling tablets packaged with cellular service.  It's not a phone, it never will be.  Phones are phones.  Tablets are tablets.

I agree, to a point; the reason they do that is mainly for internet capability, so it kinda makes sense.
That said, I STRONGLY feel that you should have the freedom of choosing your own provider no matter the device.
...or no provider at all if you wanted, and simply access through WiFi at home, work, or hotspot when it's needed.

Then and ONLY then will I ever seriously consider a pad device.

+1  It would be convenient sometimes to be able to connect to the internet away from wi-fi. However, locking the device to a particular carrier S-U-C-K-S. Why can't they just sell us tiem cards, like you can get for a pay as you go phone? You can use these for data connectivity so why not enable it for a tablet? I don't want to spend $20 a month for a data plan that I realistically might use once or twice a month...

More Android tablets are appearing in bricks and mortar stores around me - of the Android 2.21 variety, so six months old or more - and I have been impressed with the build quality and ease of use. Of course, the price is comparable to the iPad 1 fire prices I'm seeing (16GB Wi-fi only for $400), but still...

This summer/fall should be VERY interesting. Can't wait (note to self: get a job so you can afford some toys this fall!).

Ralf Maximus, the developer has been MIA for a couple of years now, at least where DC is concerned. I did e-mail him a while back to see how he was doing. He responded that he missed DC but that he's been too busy to visit...

Just had a response from winRar:

Please note that in the past we have had several promotion campaigns, offering WinRAR version-specific licenses with significant price discounts. For users who have bought such a license, the lifetime upgrade text is no longer valid and to avoid confusion we have taken it out from our websites.

For all the other WinRAR customers, who have purchased a regular license (even if the purchase has been made in 2005 or 2003 for example), we still offer free upgrades and updates. There are no indications that this policy will change in the near future.

Clear enough!

I'm using FeedDemon Pro 4 - it's excellent. I know people were P.O.'d at Nick (Bradbury, the developer) for charging for the upgrade from 3 to 4, even for those of us who had existing paid licenses for v.1.x or 2.x, but he explained himself and his situation well, I thought. Given that my first paid license was courtesy of having bought an original Newsgator license before Newsgator brought Nick on board, I didn't mind paying the upgrade fee, having enjoyed two full version cycles gratis.

EDIT: PS FeedDemon syncs fine with Google