The End of an Era: My Galaxy Tab 4
Nov. 29th, 2022 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIt is with great sadness that I retire my 7” Galaxy Tab 4, which I’ve had since 2014 and has seen so, so much use. It outlived two cell phones, had a battery replacement in 2018, and finally lost its wireless plan at the beginning of this year (it was no longer compatible with T-Mobile’s new sim cards). When Gems of War was updated to the point it would no longer load, I knew it was time.
I knew this day was coming. I had been bumping up against the 16 GB onboard storage for a couple of years, as the OS took up more and more of it and presumably some of it degraded from use. I had been deleting games and apps off of it every few months to make space for updates. But I was still using it every day, generally for Gems of War, but also for reading Kindle books, reading the internet and occasionally playing Gemcrafter or Triple Town or watching Netflix. Last year, I finally had to retire my long-term use of it for Amazon Music streaming on car trips because apparently the Bluetooth had issues and it would stutter (and cars often don’t have aux ports any more). And the native email app no longer had the security features necessary to access my email, but by that point I was 100% comfortable typing long emails on my phone anyway.
When I first got it, it was intended as part of my lifeline to the outside world from my work desk. I got it shortly before I got a private office, at a time when personal email and much of the internet was firewalled from my work PC. The unlimited data plan I got from Sprint gave me access to all the web browsing I could want, on a device more comfortable than my phone. When I got a little personal laptop for my desk in 2017, I regularly tethered my tablet to it so I could sync my OneDrive files from home and access things like Steam.
I loved the 7” form-factor because it’s about the size of a paperback novel, and in a snug case it fits comfortably into the pocket of my cargo pants. It came on many vacations and almost every trip to visit friends or family, because it was good for both short and longer-term entertainment.
I played both a ton of app store games and also Humble Bundle games that I side-loaded; and I used Aldiko for years in addition to the Kindle app so I could read downloaded books and comics, usually also from Humble Bundles. Over the years I logged Android 58 games on it (33 of which were KEMCO rpgs) and tried and culled another 56. (I also notably used MyBoy to replay Golden Sun.) I have 650 hours of gameplay officially logged but that doesn’t include Gems of War, Gemcrafter: Puzzle Journey, Triple Town, or Weapons Throwing RPG 2; all of which are just recorded as “lots”. The idea that I’ve played at least that many hours of just Gems of War over the past three years is entirely reasonable.
I’ve replaced it with an 8” Hyundai LTE Tablet that’s running the latest version of Android and has a full 64 GB of onboard storage. (And was an eminently reasonable $100.) I may get annoyed that the slightly larger form-factor won’t fit in my cargo pants, and that I need to use a bulky generic case to hold it; but it has the advantage of not having any Samsung bloatware and, because it’s cheap, I’m not going to feel too bad replacing it in a couple of years. And most importantly, my Gems of War cloud save transferred over.
Overall: Getting this tablet was a fantastic purchasing decision when I did it; it was one of my major gaming platforms for years in addition to being a convenient way to read or watch lots of digital media. If Samsung was still making 7” tablets I would have bought another one.
I knew this day was coming. I had been bumping up against the 16 GB onboard storage for a couple of years, as the OS took up more and more of it and presumably some of it degraded from use. I had been deleting games and apps off of it every few months to make space for updates. But I was still using it every day, generally for Gems of War, but also for reading Kindle books, reading the internet and occasionally playing Gemcrafter or Triple Town or watching Netflix. Last year, I finally had to retire my long-term use of it for Amazon Music streaming on car trips because apparently the Bluetooth had issues and it would stutter (and cars often don’t have aux ports any more). And the native email app no longer had the security features necessary to access my email, but by that point I was 100% comfortable typing long emails on my phone anyway.
When I first got it, it was intended as part of my lifeline to the outside world from my work desk. I got it shortly before I got a private office, at a time when personal email and much of the internet was firewalled from my work PC. The unlimited data plan I got from Sprint gave me access to all the web browsing I could want, on a device more comfortable than my phone. When I got a little personal laptop for my desk in 2017, I regularly tethered my tablet to it so I could sync my OneDrive files from home and access things like Steam.
I loved the 7” form-factor because it’s about the size of a paperback novel, and in a snug case it fits comfortably into the pocket of my cargo pants. It came on many vacations and almost every trip to visit friends or family, because it was good for both short and longer-term entertainment.
I played both a ton of app store games and also Humble Bundle games that I side-loaded; and I used Aldiko for years in addition to the Kindle app so I could read downloaded books and comics, usually also from Humble Bundles. Over the years I logged Android 58 games on it (33 of which were KEMCO rpgs) and tried and culled another 56. (I also notably used MyBoy to replay Golden Sun.) I have 650 hours of gameplay officially logged but that doesn’t include Gems of War, Gemcrafter: Puzzle Journey, Triple Town, or Weapons Throwing RPG 2; all of which are just recorded as “lots”. The idea that I’ve played at least that many hours of just Gems of War over the past three years is entirely reasonable.
I’ve replaced it with an 8” Hyundai LTE Tablet that’s running the latest version of Android and has a full 64 GB of onboard storage. (And was an eminently reasonable $100.) I may get annoyed that the slightly larger form-factor won’t fit in my cargo pants, and that I need to use a bulky generic case to hold it; but it has the advantage of not having any Samsung bloatware and, because it’s cheap, I’m not going to feel too bad replacing it in a couple of years. And most importantly, my Gems of War cloud save transferred over.
Overall: Getting this tablet was a fantastic purchasing decision when I did it; it was one of my major gaming platforms for years in addition to being a convenient way to read or watch lots of digital media. If Samsung was still making 7” tablets I would have bought another one.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 05:24 pm (UTC)