RCA Tablet - Troubles Part One

Notice that I titled this part one, as I expect I may be kept busy with this one.

Karen (my good wife) and myself have had iPads for years with no troubles and I attribute that to the quality and consistency of the hardware, and that Apple do all the legwork in keeping their operating system, OAS, stable by regular over the air (OTT) updates.

I have found that Android devices, particularly the budget variety, are never as supported, if at all, by their respective, sometimes invisible, manufacturers and my next blog was going to address that, however, something happened yesterday morning with the one month old RCA Voyager tablet, so the original Android discussion will be bumped by this report.

I bought the RCA Voyager on the 28th December, and yesterday was the 28th January, and there really had been no problems at all, granted I felt that the digitizer was a little off, but I had written that off to a sort of parallax error with my fat sossidge fingers.

Sossidge is my way of spelling it, it's my blog and I can ignore the spell checker when I wish.

I had charged the RCA overnight and was going to check my notifications and switched it on and noticed something rather odd. The visible screen was about 1/8" slimmer and the aspect ratio had changed to a noticeable degree with what looked like a visible, taped edge of the LCD showing. What was really odd is that the screen did not appear to have shifted so I thought that I may have overlooked this for the month I had been using it.

I'm old, but I'm not that old.

I carefully removed the two retaining screws and popped the case open with a spudger, I was expecting to see that the LCD had shifted, but that was not apparent as the metal surround was held by clips on all four sides and further disassembly to check if the LCD had shifted within the surround would have been risky as there were several of the small ZIF ribbon type connectors attached to the little motherboard and I've not had the best of times with those in the past.

I noticed how physically small the battery was, almost cell phone size at around 85mm  x 55mm x 3mm thick with a capacity of 2000 mAh, 7.4 Wh. and of course it was another reason not to delve further into the innards of the tablet, especially as I did not want the thing to have a meltdown when I accidentally shorted the battery.

It was time to back away from the device and not cut the blue wire...

After a reset, I packaged it all back in the box, I said to Karen that we should go to Walmart as their returns would probably be 30 days (technically, we were at 31) and off we went. It was a bit of a shock when we arrived at the tech department and the actual number was 14 days.

They had an 8GB Voyager II on display and it looked fine, full width screen. In typical fashion they had none of the 16GB units in stock and there was concern that sending us to another Walmart across town would not work out either, in fact the guys on the section had some doubts that there could be an exchange at all, mainly as the (single) in-stock Voyager II had a different SKU.

I was fine with a swap of an almost identical $72 Voyager II for my $48 Voyager, and the memory thing really wasn't a big thing for me, so after some happy discussion with customer service, the exchange was done.

I joked that if the 8GB unit went faulty, would they let me swap it for a 4GB model next time...

Oh how we all laughed...