Android

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Last week, at Walmart no less, I was staring at a Kindle Fire . I had just returned the iPad2 to my former employer and, as I had intended before they leased the iPad2, I was in the market for a Kindle Fire. As I stood there, a gentleman perhaps my age or older (you're in trouble when you can no longer tell) was looking at all the tablets on display. He assiduously started with the iPad2 on the left and worked his way all over to the Kindle Fire on the right, asking the Walmart employee fairly solid questions about each one. It became apparent that he had done some research and was making a decision. As he pondered the Kindle Fire with the low price, a gentleman fitted into an Army Reserve shirt started pressing him back to the iPad2.

He, of course, swore by the iPad2 and thought it was the greatest thing since MREs. To a large extent, he was right but it was clear that he had a dedicated use case. Despite my interest in cheap movies, I stepped in on the side of the Kindle Fire. For every application that he called out for the iPad2, I was able to call out an equivalent on the Android ¹. My Army friend's familiarity with the iPad2 was really what it was boiling down to, and then I tossed up the browser that Amazon uses uses the cloud itself to process things and thus speeding the browser on the Kindle Fire - at a lower price. He stared at me, and I balanced that with the fact that Congress had been looking into the browser itself as related to privacy.

It was clear that I had my new Army buddy in uncharted water, and he was nice enough to respect that. We agreed that it was basically about user experience - and the iPad2, hands down, still has a better user experience than most tablets. (Having had a Kindle Fire for about a week now, you can expect a post coming on that as well) However, I pointed out that Apple's app store was sometimes used to block competitors - and that when one looked at the stores available from Apple and Amazon, Amazon was the clear winner. Amazon, frankly, has more stuff and if you're intent on buying stuff, Amazon was an orgasm of consumption.

At this point, we started talking about a lot of different things, agreeing to disagree on platforms - he religiously defended the iPad2 while I was trying to be balanced between the two.

When I decided to look into a tablet for KnowProSE LLC, the premise was quite simple: I needed to get something that fit into the business. Given the nature of the services KnowProSE LLC provides, this requires a lot of a tablet PC - almost enough to make it not worth looking and only working with the laptop with which I am presently writing this.

But there's an issue. Tablets are the future of viewing content; there is a trend toward ubiquity that rivals the smartphone itself. Regardless of the plugins for Firefox/Seamonkey, the experience of the content on a tablet can only be known on a tablet pc. With the market as it stands, Apple's iPad is the unquestioned leader for a variety of reasons - particularly ease of use, as I wrote earlier - but is it good to follow the herd or is it instead better to work with an Android related device? In a perfect world and with a larger budget, getting both operating systems would be preferable - but we do not live in a perfect world and my budget, sadly, is not as large as I would like it to be.

So I broke down my requirements, as I saw them.

Last week I was changing a belt tensioner on the pickup and ended up having to deal with what is called a frozen nut. I tried the regular recipe of PB-TS Penetrating Catalyst and vice grips to no avail. I used a torch on it, hoping that the nut would expand more quickly than the bolt. None of that worked. I needed a Nut Splitter Set. You can imagine how much commentary there was on the related Facebook Status updates I had.

So I checked the websites of Ace Hardware, which is not too far away, and found their nut splitter. The size looked to be too large for where I had to get at the nut, a secret alcove that Dodge has behind the ignition coil that even the relevant Haynes manual is apparently ignorant of. And speaking of ignorance, there was a complaint on the Ace Hardware site that the nut splitter broke apart in use. These tend to be pretty solid tools with the exception of the internal threading that advances the splitter itself. In other words, if you don't know how to use it you can easily break it. I suspect that is what happened.

Menards is a bit further away but much larger, so I searched their website and lo! A nut-splitter set that looked to be able to fit. I put the pickup back together and drove to Menards, walked to the tool section and searched for about 10 minutes to no avail. Within a few more minutes, I found a sales associate strategically located near the computer with the classic DOS based inventory screen was running. I explained what I was looking for and did a quick check near the screw extractors. Not there. Bolt extractors? Found those too, but I was looking for the nut splitter. A few more associates join the search as if relishing a new challenge on a slow Saturday.

We track back to where the inventory system is. She inputs nut-splitter into the system. Nothing shows. She wanders off to look again, and I whip out my Android phone and do the search. Another young associate shows up and I give him the part number of the nut-splitter off of their website off of my phone. With that part number, the Inventory computer happily spat out where the nut-splitter was.

Within an hour, I had gotten home, broken the bad nut off and replaced the belt tensioner with a new nut. But while I was doing that, I couldn't help thinking that... the Menards website and their inventory system didn't appear connected.

I couldn't help thinking, "I can fix that". I've set up intranet sites for similar purposes, using Drupal, that do much the same thing - making the system easier to use for employees, and in one case, employees in different countries.

I also couldn't help thinking that a smartphone is an invaluable tool to a DIY mechanic.