a rant about tablets and drones

 

 

 

 When tablets and, at a similar time, drones were released in 2011, everyone i knew went batshit crazy. They had to have the top tablet, the expensive drone... and i looked at that lot and thought, what a complete waste of time. Sure, some people got some use - a traveller friend used a Phantom 4 to great effect - and my brother attempted to get a drone company off the ground. When he failed to extract revenue from potential suckers, he gave up.

At one point he owed me some money so he gave me a beaten up Phantom 3. I paired an equally beaten Note 4 with it and shot some good tracking footage for a pilot, but all said and done, I've maybe spent an hour aloft in the last 5 years, and maybe ten minutes handheld. 

 I estimate that at least 75% of the time the wind here is too strong for the machine to cope easily. At least 50% of the time, it's too dark. About 20% of the time, there's "Interference". So there are a lot of constraints - if you see a gorgeous vista, chances are the wind is too high, the light too dim and the areas to fly in not congruent with the view you want. 

I've also been given tablets. As new Galaxy Tab 10.1, two of them. Utterly, utterly useless. Running Android 4, the entire Google suite is unavailable. No play store. apk's don't work. Samsung apps don't work. The CPu almost burns out trying to play a video. 

Even getting files on and off the unit is a freaking nightmare; you have to use Kies and that app, wonderfully, won't let you store anything in the 'documents' folder because there is no 'documents' folder. I have failed to so much as place a pdf on there and open it. Remember, nothing wrong with the units at all, they're just... fucking... useless. I wanted to give one to my mom, and wanted to put solitaire on the thing. No can do. I have PCs going back to 2004 which are more capable. Even this PC is 4 years older than the tablet, and the tablet... despite working perfectly... is essentially bricked. The same OS on a phone poses no problems at all.

Tablets. Drones. I never thought much of them and now that I've been given so many, still don't think much of them. However, good fortune to me, at least I wasn't suckered into getting anything made by Pear Computer and Ripoff, inc.