Deth

I really wasn’t planning or even thinking about a new tablet, but that’s just what I wound up doing today. I have had a Samsung Tab A for several years, and it’s really served me well. It was a cheaper model when I bought it, but that was a last-minute thing when I broke the charging port on my old Asus. A new one wasn’t even on the radar.

I don’t need much for a tablet, and the new ones seem to be just too large. I know that it seems a bit counterintuitive that a larger one wouldn’t be better for my visual impairment, but the way I hold it, the bigger one is just too awkward. The increased screen size still has the typical microscopic text anyway.

I dropped my old one last week or the week before, and it seemed to be fine. The thing is, this morning I noticed that there was some play at the top of the screen, so I took it out of the case. Once it was out of the case, there was space where the screen was separated from the back. It has a lot of play, and when I did a quick search, that was a sign of a bloated battery. The last thing I want is for a battery to catch fire in a device that I use in bed. I don’t fall asleep with it in bed, but I do have it right next to my pillow on the table.

In an ideal world, I could have easily replaced the battery, but I don’t have the tools to do that. It is sad how removable batteries are a thing of the past. They could hide behind being waterproof on a phone, but on a tablet? It’s just a money grab to make things not easily replaceable. I considered taking it somewhere to fix it, but I also don’t trust them to use a quality battery. Planned obsolescence is such a selfish and short-term idea to maximize quarterly profits while wrecking the environment.

I wasn’t comfortable with not knowing, so I took a brief look at Best Buy so we could pick one up today, and they had a couple of them in the size I wanted. There were some of the cheapest ones, as always but I picked up one that was still reasonably priced.

I got it home and went through the painful process of setting it up. You know, the microscopic text in the low-contrast font in a theme is difficult for me to see. There’s no obvious way to change it, either. I hate how most things are more about design than functionality. Let’s not forget about fighting with two-factor authentication for accounts. Oh, well. I got it done.

Once it was up and running, it surprised me by being noticeably faster. I didn’t really anticipate that because the technology is pretty stagnant now and software bloat eats the hardware improvements. Everything and app I use seems to work and be a little more responsive.

Since accessibility is an oversight at least in the beta version of Street Parking’s Android app I am relegated to using the website. The website is a bloated mess and somehow manaGed to not work properly in Firefox on my old tablet. It would slow it down and grind to a halt. That site is pure bloat with trackers, animaTins and useless scripts. All it needs to do is display text, imaGes and videos