Tablet Problems

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Google is offering $150 off a Pixel Câ€”just $349 for Googleâ€™s latest tablet

This is the fully assembled Pixel C—for $349, you'd just get the tablet part.

With the release of the Android N Developer Preview and split screen coming to Android, Google's Pixel C is looking more promising than ever. To celebrate the release of the Android N Developer Preview, Google is offering a "Developer Discount" on the device—$150 off, making it $349 for the 32GB tablet. Google wants to encourage more developers to buy the tablet, but it doesn't actually require any proof of your development chops—anyone can wander over to the special site to get the discount.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Trump Affiliates With Pastor and Sandy Hook Truther Whose Website Discusses the â€˜Muslim Problemâ€™

Welcome back to #TrumpWatch, where Tablet will present the daily low-lights of Donald Trump's attempt to use the dark forces of bigotry to become President of the United States.

Today, we focus our attention on a report from media watchdog Media Matters that details the connection between Trump and Carl Gallups, a pastor at Hickory Hammock Baptist Church in Milton, FL, and radio host, who is also a Sandy Hook truther. In a press release, Trump's campaign called Gallups "incredible." He gave the opening prayer at a Trump rally in January.

…ahead of the state's March 15 Republican primary; the campaign invited Gallups to speak at a rally and touted his endorsement as a "great honor" from a "prominent" leader. Gallups is a fringe conspiracy host who believes the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, CT, was a "staged" "hoax" and that the father of one of the victims was an "actor employed by the Obama administration to take away your guns."

I wonder what the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shootings would have to say about this "hoax." I wonder how Donald Trump would respond if someone asked him if he believed the shootings were a hoax, and why he was campaigning with someone like Gallups, whose website PPSIMMONS News and Ministry Network touted the "fake" events and "fake fathers" in Connecticut. (If you were to visit PPSIMMONS News and Ministry Network right now, the first blog post details the "Muslim problem" and other anti-establishment messages that seem to be activating hoards of voters into Trump's camp.) Muslims, the article states, want "to spread their hate among and against us." Trump, of course, has called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." I also wonder what Trump, who has distanced himself from David Duke, and recently Hitler, would have to say about this affiliation to Gallups and his network.

What say ye, Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii? How will you vote? And Florida, where Gallups influence is intended to help Trump secure the delegates in the Sunshine State, his second home? We'll know soon.

Jonathan Zalman, a staff editor, runs The Scroll, Tablet's news blog.

Source: Trump Affiliates With Pastor and Sandy Hook Truther Whose Website Discusses the 'Muslim Problem'

Toshiba tablets at Black Friday prices

Matt Granite , KUSA 7:00 AM. MST March 07, 2016

Tablet (Photo: Premier Group)

KUSA - In my continued quest to save you as much cash as humanly possible, today a tablet deal that makes this Friday feel more like Black Friday.

Before we get to the deal, I will be on vacation next week and not posting daily savings articles. If you'd like to have the biggest deals in the country emailed to you, subscribe to my deal list right here.

The problem with most of the tablet deals we see these days is they are completely under-equipped. While many tablets in the $150 - $200 range look nice, they are designed for consuming content (watching videos, and browsing the web) rather than producing content.

Today's Toshiba Tablet deal packs enough punch for productivity, work correspondence and the power of Windows to get many common jobs done on the fly.

The Toshiba Encore 2 just dropped to its lowest recorded price and what makes this tablet different is the quad-core processor, generous 64 GB of storage (8 times more than the entry level fire tablet), superb speakers and solid display.

Check out my unboxing of the Toshiba Encore 2 tablet right here alongside a speed demo.

The operating system, front and read cameras, battery life and expandable storage makes this a no-brainer buy at $169. While I would never pay $300+ for this tablet, the under $170 price plunge is very enticing.

$160 Off 8" Toshiba Encore 2 Tablet 64GB + Free ShippingWas: $329.99Now: $169.99**There is a slightly different color and older model of this tablet available online for $10 less.

Additional features include:

· 1.33 GHz Intel Atom Quad-Core Processor

· 8.0" 10-Point Multi-Touch IPS Display

· WXGA 1280 x 800 Native Resolution

· Integrated 64GB Storage & 2GB of RAM, Expandable storage

· 5 megapixel read camera and 1.2 megapixel front camera

· Stereo speakers and integrated microphone

Matt Granite is host and producer of "Ways to Save", a daily deal and consumer segment for TV, web and USA Today. No company pays us to feature their products. For exclusive daily deals and freebies, get on his list.

Source: Toshiba tablets at Black Friday prices

Monday, March 7, 2016

Users will get faster free Wi-Fi from hubs in New York

New York City is replacing pay phones with new high-tech wireless hubs that will dish out free, high-speed Wi-Fi service, charge mobile devices and provide access to city services.

In coming months, the city will install about 7,500 LinkNYC hubs, which include an Android tablet for surfing the Internet, connecting to city services and making VoIP calls. The hub will also include a wireless hotspot for connecting smartphones, tablets and PCs to the Internet.

But the new technology has one potential challenge that pay phones didn't have: How do you keep the hubs -- also called Links -- up to date in a fast-changing technology world?

The project will handle that problem by bringing major technology upgrades to Links, at least during the first six years, a spokesman for the LinkNYC project said Monday. The city is still testing the Links and figuring out an upgrade schedule.

The upgrades will focus in part on increasing processing power and wireless speeds.

Sitting at the center of Links is an Android tablet on which a user can surf the Internet, use pre-installed apps, or make phone calls. On each side of the Link are 55 high-definition displays for advertisements and city notices.

Qualcomm has provided some of the technologies for the Links, which are designed so the networking equipment, processor, tablet and other components can be regularly swapped out and upgraded.

Qualcomm is committed to maintaining and upgrading systems over the lifetime of Links, said Kiva Allgood, vice president at Qualcomm's Smart Cities and Industrial IoT initiative.

The goal is to keep the Links up to date with the latest technologies much like latest smartphones, Allgood said.

The Links and the Android tablets are powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor with an Adreno 320 GPU. It'll be easy to snap out old technologies and plug in the latest processor and tablet, or change the screen to a higher resolution display, project organizers said.

The Links' Wi-Fi and modem technologies will also be upgradable. A Link has 802.11ac multi-mode MIMO chip for gigabit Wi-Fi. It also has a 3G modem for 911 emergency calling and location services.

Qualcomm designs modems and Wi-Fi chipsets, which are used in other companies' products like smartphones and routers. The company didn't say whether upgrades would be made by the company or by partners.

LinkNYC is in beta, and product plans will be released to partners over time, Allgood said.

Systems like LinkNYC need hardware flexibility to keep up with new Internet of Things implementations, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

The way New York City uses the LinkNYC systems could change over time, and they may be the backbone to connect lighting systems, smart meters, traffic networks, connected cameras and other IoT systems, McGregor said.

Hardware changes like memory and modem upgrades will be needed over time, McGregor said. An example could be an upgrade to 5G connectivity, a technology designed to facilitate IoT and machine-to-machine communication.

But upgrades will need to be relevant, not random. For example, a processor upgrade would make sense if it's used to handle faster modems and high-resolution screens, McGregor said.

Source: Users will get faster free Wi-Fi from hubs in New York

Amazon values encryption so much that it drops support on Kindle Fire tablets

Businessman Suit Fingers Crossed Swear

Amazon has came out in support of encryption, following Apple's recent legal battles with the US government, saying that it "plays a very, very important role" in protecting customer data.

But you might be surprised to learn that Amazon has also decided to quietly drop support for full disk encryption on its Android-based Kindle Fire tablets. Since it is portraying itself as an encryption and consumer advocate, its decision to go in the opposite direction strikes me as sheer hypocrisy.

Amazon says that the reason why full disk encryption is no longer supported on its Kindle Fire tablets is that few customers were taking advantage of this feature. As you may know, full disk encryption is not enforced by default, but users who want the extra protection can turn it on easily from the Android's settings menu. The average user probably does not even know it exists, but power users are obviously more knowledgeable and more willing to go the extra mile.

Amazon wants to look good in the eyes of privacy advocates and its own customers, but it no longer seems to want to deal with any of the implications that encryption support entails: added costs. And I am not talking just about maintaining the software.

The hardware can most likely handle full disk encryption, because, after all, this feature was available until recently. But, if users have issues, support teams have to take their complaints, testers have to investigate those problems, and, finally, developers have to create patches. This all takes time and resources, which ultimately costs Amazon money. Meanwhile, if the US government needs access to Amazon's customers' data, its agencies will be able to easily extract that information from Kindle Fire devices -- and, just like that, Amazon avoids any costly legal battles.

But, in doing that, Amazon has created a new problem: its decision to drop encryption support is backfiring. Normally, this would not be such a big issue, but considering all the talk surrounding encryption and privacy coupled with Amazon's public stance, you can understand why this is "stupid", as cryptologist Bruce Schneier put it.

"Removing device encryption due to lack of customer use is an incredibly poor excuse for weakening the security of those customers that did use the feature", explains Jeremy Gillula, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff technologist. "Given that the information stored on a tablet can be just as sensitive as that stored on a phone or on a computer, Amazon should instead be pushing to make device encryption the default -- not removing it".

Amazon's CTO seems to share the same opinion, as Werner Vogels says that "encrypting your data... of your customers is mandatory. It is not only mandatory from a business point or in the cloud, but also on premise. You should be encrypting your data".

"So we are very strong believers that encryption should be in the hands of our customers and they should be the ones who decide who has access to the data and nobody else", Vogels adds. I suspect that after this whole fiasco Amazon will learn that you cannot say one thing and do another, if it inconveniences you in any way.

Photo Credit: mikute/Shutterstock

Source: Amazon values encryption so much that it drops support on Kindle Fire tablets

Sunday, March 6, 2016

IT'S GEEK TO ME: Samsung tablet refuses to open attachments from iPhone

Question: I have a Samsung Pro 9000 Tablet which works great except for one thing. It will not open attachments sent from the new iPhones. Attachments sent from other devices work fine. Has there been a change in how the attachments are sent from iPhones? Most of the attachments that have failed are small attachments sent in jpeg.

Jack H. Shalimar, Florida

Answer: As I am not a regular user of Android, this was one of those questions for which I had to go and do quite a bit of research, rather than relying on personal knowledge. Potential answers were so elusive that I almost chose not to use your question, Jack. (That, and the fact that you didn't provide me with any contact information except your e-mail address.)

Most of my research turned up nothing but users complaining about this problem, and further complaining that nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Some claim that it is related to one specific data provider, in those cases AT&T, but that seems like it's not the case. Quite a few of the complaints I read were about text/SMS messaging, and I realized that your e-mail never explicitly said e-mail, and the word "attachments" could be interpreted to mean either e-mail or SMS messaging. However, the more common use is e-mail, so I opted to take that route.

My research finally revealed a handful of possible solutions. Some speculated that the image simply had not finished downloading yet, and said that if you keep scrolling to the bottom, you will find a spinning circle indicating the pending download. It is possible that such downloads would be blocked when you are using data on the provider network rather than WiFi. Several users discovered that the device's e-mail app was having difficulty writing to the external SD card. Their solution was to unmount and remount their external SD card. To try this, go under Settings->More…->Storage, and find the external card.

If none of these problems help you, Jack, I'm afraid I'm at a loss. Perhaps one of my other readers is an Android Geek and has some knowledge to share? If so, log onto ItsGeekToMe.co and comment on today's article.

Q: First I want to applaud you for that fantastic Christmas light display ( It has to be a lot of work!!!!) Thank you! And now my problem: My desktop PC went bad, so I took it to the Geeks at Best Buy, they told me that it would be too expensive to repair, so I bought a new one. Since they had replaced the HDD not too long before that I bought an external 3.5" HD enclosure, USB 2.0 interface to retrieve my old files from it, but to my surprise most of my files were missing: Pictures, document, etc. Is this normal or should I blame them?

Carol O. Freeport, Florida

A: Thanks for the kind words about the Geek Lights on the Corner, Carol. I hope you're tuned into the show's Facebook page, because I'm about to publicly announce some massive changes coming to the show for Season 9! Check it out at tinyURL.com/GeekLights.

Missing files are never what I would consider "normal". However, the files may not actually be missing, but instead are located on the drive other than where you expect them to be. When a PC is booted from a hard disk, certain locations on that disk are treated as "special" by Windows. The physical folder of these special locations aren't normally displayed in the navigation bar of your file browser. I'm talking about directories like My Documents, My Pictures, etc. – coincidentally (not really) the locations where the files you're asking about would have lived.

When a drive is just a drive, and is not the device from which Windows boots, these locations lose their "special" characteristics and you must access them by their explicit path name. What that is depends on the user who is signed in to the computer. Let's assume the username in your case is "Carol". The path to the document files would be C:\Users\Carol\Documents\. Of course, replace "C:" with whatever drive letter the system has assigned to the drive in the external housing.

One final word: I would head back over to Best Buy and ask your salesperson just exactly what he or she was thinking selling you an external drive housing with a USB 2.0 interface. That could really bottleneck that drive, since USB 2.0 data transfer speeds top out at about 60 megabytes per second, where your drive may be capable of data transfer rates of 300 megabytes per second. They should have sold you one that was at least USB 3.0, which has a data transfer rate up to 640 megabytes per second – over 10 times faster than USB 2.0.

Source: IT'S GEEK TO ME: Samsung tablet refuses to open attachments from iPhone

Toshiba tablets at Black Friday prices

Ways 2 Save: 50% off Toshiba tablets

Matt Granite , WGRZ 6:44 AM. EST March 04, 2016

Toshiba Encore

BUFFALO, NY -- - In my continued quest to save you as much cash as humanly possible, today a tablet deal that makes this Friday feel more like Black Friday.