From my earlier postings on this subject you will know that I have been involved with tablets since before there was any competition for the IPad. Since that time, I have owned many tablets and had both good and bad experiences with them.

One of the things I love about tablets is the touch screen. Even the inventor of the mouse has been known to say that said mouse is a terrible interface. The touch screen on the other hand is everything the mouse is without the repetitive motion of the mouse. My only problem with a tablet is that, for the most part, it isn’t the same as a desktop computer. First the OS is not general, so you have no development tools. Unlike the desktop, there is no Operating System Installation mechanism available, so you can’t pick and choose your OS. Almost all tablets are either IOS of Android, very few Linux or Windows machines are available.

Looking for something to replace my desktop machine (or even my laptop) has had me looking at large tablets. My first tablets were 10 inch screens, which is about the limit of what you want to carry around, but I wanted something bigger, like a laptop screen. So I started looking at machines with 13 inch screens. I have owned several different models, and all of them have suffered from insufficient battery and slow processors and they all come in around $200 to $300 dollars, which is more than any of the smaller machines. None of these machines have lasted more than a year before the charging system or battery failed making them no longer able to operate. My last attempt only lasted about a month and a half before it would not boot when on the charger, and not hold a charge when running for more than a few hours even with the charger plugged in. (plug it back in after booting and it will run and charge, sort of) So, I have pretty much given up on large format screens.

Of the 10 inch tablets, my best experience has been with Sony’s Experia. It is very thin and light with very good battery life. My worst experience was with a BQ tablet that came with a very crippled and broken Ubuntu installation. The hardware is beautiful, snappy and slim, but the OS is completely crippled by being installed on a read-only file system, so packages can’t actually be installed, and most of the applications are so badly broken that they are unusable. Most notably the Kindle app has all the artwork of the android app, but none of the buttons work. Only some very clunky movement tools are layered on top of the artwork for the real apps controls. Overall very disappointing.

I have had several good 7 inch tablets, most notably a dual boot Windows10/Android machine from CHUWI. This machine runs on an Intel chip, so all the Windows stuff you might want to load will load and run just like on your Windows desktop machine. This is a very nice little machine.

All my tablets have been WiFi only until AT&T gave me a free 7 inch tablet that connects to the cell phone network with a $10 per month connection fee. The AT%T version of Android has a very different entry method. Usually you swipe in a direction, either upward or sideways to open the lock screen. On this tablet you have to touch and hold a specific spot on the screen to unlock it. It is not very responsive and you have to touch it just right and hold it just right to get the lock screen to open. Other than that, and the way it handles desktop folders it runs just like all the other Android tablets, has good battery life, and a Class C USB connector, like my One-Plus phone. No more turning the plug over three times before it will connect. Yes three times. Even if you have it right the first time it will not slip in smoothly until you turn it over and discover the other side is wrong and then return to the original position.

While I do most of my shopping on Amazon, I really like to find the actual manufacturer and purchase from them, or at least check out their site for other interesting items. Because I have enjoyed the CHUWI dual boot machine so much, I went out to their site and discovered that they make several tablet/laptop style machines (a tablet with a detachable keyboard) and one of them boots both Windows10 and Android.

Now, I actually have an old Dell Insperon laptop. It still holds a good charge on its battery and is not too terribly slow, but it is a 32 bit machine, and Chrome has recently stopped supporting 32 bit machines. This makes a perfectly good piece of hardware no longer functional enough to serve its purpose! So I ordered the tablet from CHUWI. Coming from China it took several weeks to arrive, but that was expected. The tablet is exactly what I was looking for, I am finishing this article on the new machine, and only have one problem. This is the problem I have with all keyboards with a touchpad. The pad is directly under the center of the keyboard, allowing the cheeks of my thumbs to brush the pad while typing, causing the cursor to move to some random part of the text, where you continue typing. Really very agrivating. So it is almost exactly like a laptop with a touch screen. Haven’t found any way to disable the touchpad, but if I hold my hands just right touch typing works OK!

If you are looking for something special in a tablet  CHUWI is the place to go.