Nextbook NX785QC8G Review

My son recently purchased the NX785QC8G Nextbook at Walmart for $69.00.

This is a budget 8″ tablet, the screen is a smidgen under 8″.

I snapped a quick picture, sorry f9r the blow quality. The glass on this product is super high gloss and easily collect fingerprints, smudges, etc. However, the device feel solid and is equipped with a 3.5 mm headphone jack, a mini USB port, a micro HDMI port and an micro SD slot.

The Nextbook has 5.5 GB of memory which is on the light side for a game crazy child. My son found tht he didn’t enough room to install more games. We inserted a 4 GB micro SD card and discovered the tablet happily dropped downloaded apps on to the card by default. Nice feature. His only issue now is to maintain enough space for downloading and installing. Since he is living on just a few megs of space, there are days when he can’t install items without rebooting. Presumably, he is running with a lot junk open and the cache eats his free storage space.

The camera is so-so. It is on par with an old cell phone. The single speaker works as you would expect, but found that the volume is more than adequate.

At the end of the day, I can’t say this great tab but for $69 it is very reasonable.

Little Things

Sometimes, I am amused by little things. A few weeks ago, I sent in an idea to ADB and they used it. You can follow ADB by clicking the link. 

It was a small thing, but nice to see.

The Great International Paper Airplane Construction Kit

I found this book in a stack of computer manuals. It isn’t a game, but boy was it a lot of fun.

I don’t seem to have the disc, but as I recall it had clipart to customize the planes before printing.

My First Con

I found a brochure from my first con, from away back in 1977.

The Great Lakes Convention was presented by The Western New York Wargamers Association at the Sheraton-Lockport Inn.

Mint LXDE - What's Missing

I installed Mint LXDE 5 or six days ago. In a weeks time, I thought I would have a laundry list of software I absolutely must install. This is LXDE after all.

Surprisingly, that is not the case. LXDE is lightweight, but that doesn’t mean limited software. Right out the install box, Mint contains all of the software you might need for almost any task. For word processing Abiword is all you need; Spreadsheets are handled very well by Gnumeric; Gimp provides all of the photoediting capabilities one might need for almost any task.  Exaile is excellent for music and video is handled well by both MPlayer and VLC. Firefox is the go to web browser for any system and it did not require any updates with Mint LXDE 11, which was a nice touch. In fact with this version of Mint, I don’t believe I had more than a couple of updates.

So what did I HAVE to install? I selected Libre Office over Gnumeric and Abiword; however these to pieces of software are so handy that I decided to keep them. Considering all of the options in Libre Office, keeping them is high praise. For web browsers I needed something other than Firefox so I selected Opera and Epiphany-Browser. There is no beating Firefox in my book, but sometimes I need to look at websites in something else. Opera was selected because I last used this on my old Mac. Epiphany was snap decision, I wanted to take a drive with something new to me

The only lack I saw by way of software was a plain jane HTML editor and an ebook manager. Abiword could do it and there is nothing wrong with gedit, but Bluefish is my favourite. As for ebooks, I selected Calibre because it works so well and does so much more.

I hope to do a write up of my new software choices soon, so say tuned.