Digital eBook reader devices...

[ericbsmith]

OTOH I picked up an iView SupraPad i700QW during a Christmas sale. The main reason I bought this one is because it was a ridiculously cheap Windows 8 tablet. It's limitations are many-fold; first it only has a 16GB SSD built in, which is just barely enough for Windows. This means jumping through hoops to install programs onto an SD card. On the bright side it did take a 64GB SD card with no issues. It's screen isn't IPS, and the viewing angle is pretty horrible, which means that when used in portrait mode you can actually see color inversion in either one eye or the other. On top of that its native screen resolution is only 1024x600, which is below the minimum requirement for Win8, so they upscale the resolution to 1280x768. This causes text to be a bit blurry, I had to go through quite a few hoops to get it to run at the native resolution, and still wind up having to change resolution back to the default in order to use any Win8 touch apps.

OTOH, it does run GCA decently, and works well enough with any of the Windows PDF viewers - in fact it can run any native Windows programs (assuming the CPU and RAM requirements aren't too high), and has been a good testbed for me with windows tablets. It also came with a 1 year subscription to Office 365, which normally costs $50 by itself. I'm happy I bought it at the $50 I got it for, but do kind of wish I'd spent a little bit more to overcome it's various limitations.

[ericbsmith]

Microsoft just dropped the price of the HP Stream 7 Signature Edition to $79.99 in their online store. The HP Stream 7 has specs very similar to the iView i700QW I mentioned in my last post, except the HP has 32 GB SSD (leaving ~17GB free for you to install programs) and a native resolution 1280x800 IPS screen (alleviating both of my issues with the iView screen). In addition to the 1 year subscription to Office 365, included with all Win8.1 tablets, the HP also comes with a $25 gift card for the Windows Store.

I'm sorely tempted to buy the HP Stream 7 and sell off my iView at the $80 price point.

[RevBob]

Be wary of that Office 365 license. Last time I checked, its terms explicitly prohibit using it for commercial purposes... such as, say, writing a book or an article for which you will be paid.

[panton41]

Originally Posted by RevBob

Be wary of that Office 365 license. Last time I checked, its terms explicitly prohibit using it for commercial purposes... such as, say, writing a book or an article for which you will be paid.

I have a feeling Microsoft is more worried about a small business buying the cheaper home licenses to use in their office than freelance and amatuer writers using their product for its intended purpose in their own homes.

If they started suing authors over this you can expect holy hell to fall on them in the form of bad press pretty much overnight - the tech press in general hates subscription software licenses and is salivating over finding a story like this - and Office 365 sales (even business licenses) would dry up across the board and, frankly, they're not that stupid. (It would probably kill Adobe's Creative Cloud as well.)

[RevBob]

Originally Posted by ciaran_skye

I have a feeling Microsoft is more worried about a small business buying the cheaper home licenses to use in their office than freelance and amatuer writers using their product for its intended purpose in their own homes.

I, for one, am unwilling to take that chance. Besides, I can use LibreOffice at no charge, with no subscription, for any purpose.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by RevBob

I, for one, am unwilling to take that chance. Besides, I can use LibreOffice at no charge, with no subscription, for any purpose.

I find Libre Office to be very slow, some of the time, especially the Calc spreadsheet. It changes from version to version, with some being glacially slow and others being acceptable speed.

With Write, the word processor, I find that scroll speed is consistently unacceptable whereas MS Word is always lightning fast to scroll in large complex documents.

So there are definitely some serious OS-specific optimizations that the LibreGuys need to do, in order to win more market share.

[RevBob]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

With Write, the word processor, I find that scroll speed is consistently unacceptable whereas MS Word is always lightning fast to scroll in large complex documents.

I generally only use Writer, and I'm working with short documents (10K words, if that) which are basically straight text. For that, I can even use LO on a netbook with no problems; everything zips along just fine. (Literally, my "LO PC" has 2 gigs of RAM and 32 gigs of flash storage. It runs Windows 8.1/32 and was a $100 Black Friday deal at one retailer.)

Granted, I may need to stitch several of those together at the end of the process, but that's a singular event. I can cope with some sluggishness at that stage. So, at least for my purposes, LibreOffice is a dandy option. I use the Portable version, specifically; while I have installs on both of my laptops, I also keep one on a USB stick just in case.

(I have a minor sideline in polishing ebooks. The main author I'm working with sends each chapter as a separate ODT file, and they usually run 4000 to 9000 words each. I render to HTML, update a running copy of the ebook, look it over on a couple of readers, and send it back with any notes. If I start writing my own stuff, I'll probably use the same method; it seems to be working well.)

[Parody]

Yeah, it sucks to pay the Office tax. Neither the Office 365 Personal subscription included with many Windows 8(.1) machines nor the Office 2013 Home and Student included with my Transformer T100 allow for commercial use.

Creative Cloud is no different; Educational and other discounted licenses are non-commercial as well, as were the similar licenses for the Creative Suites.

Subscription licensing didn't change this, so I'm not sure how that figures in. I'm not a fan of subscriptions, but not because of non-commercial use restrictions. (I am glad I upgraded to the CS6 version of my suite while it was still discounted. It'll be a while before I move to CC, if ever.)

LibreOffice/OpenOffice are not great substitutes in my experience, but they're better than nothing and the price is right. The times I've tried to use Writer or Calc for anything somewhat complex I've had problems. Not all of those projects were completed in Office, but there were a couple of very bad failures. I still have an open bug report from 8 years ago for one of them.

[thorr-kan]

Originally Posted by thorr-kan

Has anyone tried the UbiSoft ultracheap tablet?

Dead thread arisen'. And replying to my own post. How gauche.

I have the Ubislate 7ci. I bought it about a 1.5 years ago. And it turns out if you buy a cheap tablet, you let it sit for awhile. Stats:
Screen size (inches) 7.00
Resolution 800x400 pixels
Processor 1GHz
RAM 512MB
Internal storage 4GB
Expandable storage Yes
Expandable storage type microSD
Expandable storage up to (GB) 32
Front camera 0.3-megapixel
Operating System Android 4.0
Wi-Fi Yes
Headphones 3.5mm
Accelerometer Yes

Once I got mine up and running, I find that it functions OK. It serves as a decent ebook reader using the Kindle Android app. The existing MP3 player is adequate, but a little tinny. The existing PDF reader is poor, but it shows the colors of my PDFs OK. Video quality is decent; it plays youtube and other videos well enough to enterain my monkeys. Wireless speed is decent.

Battery life is terrible, so it's always plugged into charge. It's a dual tasker; any more apps, and it gets cranky.

Mine's survived two falls on the ice. The case is really loose now, the power buttons fell out on the last fall, and the wallcharging plug did too. But I've taped the case together and the USB charger still works.

For $38, I'm pleased. I'll probably upgrade a model in awhile. This one will become the gaming reward for the monkeys.