Mike Wilks' Blog

The Kogan tablet is £119 plus delivery on their website but if you are patient you can get it £30 cheaper on eBay.

For a 7″ Android 2.3.3 Tablet with a capacitive screen that is stupidly good value.  I’ve rooted mine to play about with Android but even on the stock ROM it is an awesome bit of cheap kit.

Other than a bit of trouble getting the SD card to lock in place and limited battery life I have no complaints.

I ordered a Nexus One during the announcement event and I’ve had it a couple of days now. I got it to replace my iPhone 3G (not S) which is looking slightly long in the tooth now. Initial thoughts:

Positives

• It is blazing fast compared to the iPhone 3G.
• The screen is much crisper and colours pop more.
• The gMail client is infinitely better than the mail on the iPhone.
• No more 10Mb download limit on podcasts over 3G !
• Voip over 3G with Sipdroid and localphone.com is a killer app. That said SipDroid doesn’t seem to like localphone direct so I need to configure pbxes.org which will hopefully give better results.

Negatives

• I really miss 1Password – hopefully there is an Android version before too long.
• Multi-touch is not there on the standard apps. Not a huge thing but muscle memory keeps trying to do it.
• Bookmark sync with safari is going to take some getting used to not having. That said Crossmarks mobile site as a replacement is working pretty well so far.

I’m currently on the O2 Simplicity for iPhone tariff so I thought I better tell them I no longer had an iPhone. In theory the normal Simplicity tariff has more minutes and texts than the iPhone one but in reality I never get anywhere near using them.  Calling O2 just led to confusion. Once I got across what I wanted to do they initially told me that I should move to Simplicity 20 – but only if I was sure I wasn’t going back to iPhone. Eventually after he struggled with the system for 5 minutes while I was on hold he advised me to leave it as is. If there’s any come back about me being on the wrong tariff I might need to request they listen to the tape!

The phone is unlocked so I guess I need to look through the Sim only deals out there. O2 is not a great signal where I live but does seem to be properly unlimited data (at least they have never complained). I spend at least as much time away from home as at home so I can just about live with 3 bars of 2G at home. Vodafone is a much better 2G signal (in fact we can see the 2G only tower) but has a pathetic 500Mb limit as does Orange. That said at least I could just about get a 3G signal on Orange at home. I really do not understand how they are allowed to advertise 500Mb as unlimited. 3 and T-Mobile are complete non-starters as there is no signal at home. Decisions decisions, my Vodafone 3G data contract is up in a couple of months just to complicate things, the Mifi I use in theory means I need less phone data when I travel.

More updates as I live with the phone a bit longer.