The great experimenting begins

[Flitterkill]

Woot right now has the Viewsonic G 10 inch tablet for $285 shipped. A bajillion custom roms and some pretty high specs. I've been waiting for the Kindle DX Graphite to drop in price or show up reconditioned and now Amazon has just lost out as my need to consume PDFs away from sitting at desk in front of a PC has gotten to be too great and with Woot dangling that in front of me...

 

 

Couple that with the pending arrival (heh) of my new phone, the HTC Arrive and I've got some serious hardware/software experimenting this month. I've got 30 days for the phone to shake out before the return window closes. I'd still kill for a Dell Venue Pro but since they ain't on Sprint I gotta take the plunge with this one. Dell has another WP7 unit due this summer but no announcement on carrier so that leaves me out as well. The new Evo phones don't swing until this summer sometime and I can grab plain old used Evo's just about anywhere cheaply enough to not justify using my upgrade on them. The Bluetooth is locked down somewhat on WP7 right now so I won't be able to pair the phone's gps to the G Tablet to use as a giant gps unit for the Xterra and that has me a touch annoyed, though Bluetooth gps pucks aren't that expensive so... I'm rolling with WP7 mainly because I'm very much over icons on my handhelds, going back through all the Dell Axim revisons of PocketPC's and the Ipod Touches. I love my Zune HD, the Metro interface is killer and I'm curious to see how it plays out in a more fleshed out phone form. I can get developer access easily enough for tweaking purposes so that'll help. I'm sure I'll miss somethings that aren't exposed right now in the software/hardware but I got 30 days to figure this out. For the tablet, the big thing really is PDF's over anything else. WiFi trumps 3G access as my rails are mainly home and university settings, though I'll probably wish I had 3G the few times I'm in other settings (but not enough to drop another 100 to 200 for it plus monthly fees)

 

 

Running impressions/review logs for both forthcoming...