Hands-On Test With the Dirt-Cheap CherryPad Tablet 168
MojoKid writes "A small company out of Palo Alto, CA — Cherrypal — made headlines recently with the announcement of their dirt-cheap $188 CherryPad tablet. The CherryPad is a 7-inch slate that comes preloaded with the Android 2.1 operating system and is driven by an 800MHz ARM11-based processor by Samsung, backed by a meager 256MB of DDR2 system memory. The device is also based on a resistive touch display, so it takes a bit of getting used to, if you've been working with devices like the iPhone or similar, where capacitive touch displays are ubiquitous. Just what does $188 buy you in an Android tablet? In short, the CherryPad falls down a bit where Cherrypal decided to cut corners from a cost perspective. The device needs another 256MB of RAM (for 512MB total) and a higher quality touch screen (perhaps a 1GHz CPU?) and that would have likely pushed its price northward a bit to be sure."
Re:resistive? (Score:3, Informative)
All cheap android tablets are resistive. I've seen people say good things about wits a81e [houseofdap.com], also a resistive and the Android versions has been shipping since june/july I think.
Re:No thats isn't the most importaint question (Score:1, Informative)
The important question is, can it view this site [ow.ly] correctly
Goatse Alert! Don't click ... or be sure to face away from your keyboard when you puke.
Re:Holy design, Batman. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:slate ? I prefer to buy a tablet. (Score:3, Informative)
> Merely descriptive words are not supposed to be trademarks...
Descriptive words can be trademarks for products they don't describe: APPLE for example. You would have to show that "pad" was commonly used to describe that sort of device before Apple started selling theirs.
Re:Cherrypal scam? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I like the form factor (Score:3, Informative)
Heard about the samsung galaxy tab? And i think they will be selling a stylus for it, even tho it is capacitive.
Re:resistive? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:slate ? I prefer to buy a tablet. (Score:4, Informative)
No, they're PADD on Star Trek.
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD [memory-alpha.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS [wikipedia.org]
Re:resistive? (Score:1, Informative)
By "a real stylus" the OP means "whatever pointy stick that happens to be laying around". Therein lies the problem with capacitive touchscreens; you can not use whatever pointy sticks that happens to be laying around. Instead you have to special order one for the cost of a very good lunch, and then sit around for a week not poking your screen until it arrives. Sure you can head up to PlastiMart and pick up a generic one, but you want one with that shiny Banana Computer logo on the side with it's flawless design aesthetics.
Re:resistive? (Score:1, Informative)
Yes but all capacitive styluses suck. They are those fat, soft, marker-like deals. That's not even mentioning the fact that a capacitive screen cannot truly measure pressure for sketching/drawing nor that a capacitive screen is just not as accurate (resolution of 1024x1024 compared to resistive's 4096x4096) and has a slower response time. You can also touch/hold a resistive screen without activating anything and they can be used very similarly to physical buttons without requiring you to completely lift your finger off of the screen to register multiple presses.
Honestly, capacitive is lame. It's an old technology that basically every Synaptics touchpad has used for the past 15 years or more. The only reason some people go out of their way to look for them is because of the hype around iPhone/iPad and because they don't understand the numerous disadvantages they actually have.
Re:Cherrypal scam? (Score:1, Informative)
badass Turion X2
That's quite an oxymoron there. I used to have a Turion64 X2 based laptop but replaced with with a C2D that is only slightly higher clocked, but probably performs about 4 times as fast.
Design patent != invention patent (Score:3, Informative)
And you think that Apple's design and form factor of the iPad is somehow groundbreaking?
GP was refering to design patents [wikipedia.org] - these cover the cosmetic design of products and the rules are quite different from the regular patents that we love to hate.
So, this isn't about the Cherrypad being a touch-sensitive tablet computer: its about how closely some of the non-functional cosmetic details resemble those of the iDevices.
Did the Dynabook concept include a stylized-fruit logo "etched" into the centre of the slightly curved "brushed aluminium" backplate?
Re:You can buy this right now for around $100 (Score:1, Informative)
Yes it is. The Cherrypal is a fake and the Pandigital can be bought at retail right now.
If the specs are similar, whats the difference?
Search Slickdeals for a current deal to get the Novel for ~$100.
Netbooks dont have touch screens. I use my Novel for a lot of kids stuff where the touch screen is mandatory. Touching sight words, drawing and painting, etc. That I can use it as a browsing tablet is just a plus, the killer app for this is teaching kids. But I'm sure as heck not giving my 5 year old a $600 ipad to poke at.
The Walgreens tablet is a similar price, but runs a weak 400MHz chip. The replacement firmwares from Slatedroid allow you to run setcpu to clock the Novel to 800MHz, which isnt a true overclock because the ARM chip in it is spec'd for 800MHz usage. Pandigital runs it at 523 because that extends the battery life and they only intended it to be used to read books.
Battery life is fine. I run mine @ 800MHz all the time and have used it for several hours and still had more than half the battery available.