Downward Trends

I am sure that there will be more of these type of posts as time goes on, because as an old geezer with some skin in the game I am constantly amused and amazed at the deals out there and how the application of Moores law drives the cost of tech down.

I was buying terrible Android tablets seven or so years ago, they were flakey, they were unreliable, they had a limited shelf life because the chances of the operating systems going wonky were very high, and the chances of recovering from a crash very low, but they were fun and exciting, mainly because the concept was so darn new and taming the unpredictable nature of the beasts was a good indicator that if you could keep them going you were indeed a "tech" geezer.

The names of the Android 2.0 devices that come to mind are the Z-Pad, the ZenPad, I could go back further as around the end of the millenium I owned an Apple Newton, but that was really just a PDA along with my other Pocket PC devices of the time.

I just popped onto eBay to do a search for Witstech Tablet and it produced zero results, perhaps that particular one was a dream sequence....

Ok, I found a Youtube video from July 2011, so I feel my sanity is slipping back into place.

The downward trend I am referring to is price point, and perhaps quality and reliability. I think perhaps in the Witstech, Z-Pad, ZenPad days I was paying a few hundred bucks for an Android tablet of dubious quality, but I think after dabbling with them, I managed to release them back into the eBay wild kingdom with little loss in my valuable tech funding.

As usual, times have changed and prices have dropped.

A few days ago, I bought one of these at Walmart for $48 (Canadian Dollars) which I considered to be quite a small amount of money to be shelling out for a tablet.

I will review this budget offering in the next post.