A phone or a tablet is useful but sometimes you just need a bigger screen and a keyboard. I'd looked at some of the all-in-one Android solutions and puzzled over the pros and cons but then it occured to me that, like most of us probably, I've already got a half decent screen and a wireless keyboard spare, so I bought one of those very cheap Android TV stick things from ebay and it's great!
It plugs into the DVI port via a small HDMI adapter and I also found a small ethernet adapter that connects via the micro USB port with a short adapter, and to save straining the power from the stick I got an 8 point powered hub. These were all from ebay and very cheap and it all runs from one USB power supply. It does work really well. It took a short while to find how to do things with the mouse instead of a touch screen but it's easy, and most of the short-cut keys on the keyboard work too - home, email, search, ctrl-c, ctrl-v etc. With the ethernet hard wired accessing my NAS is easy too, so the 8 GB of storage on the stick isn't a problem. In fact I've set up a sync app to move anything downloaded to a folder on the NAS.
It's really cheap to run too, using a fraction of the power of a low wattage light bulb, so it can be just left on all the time and just the monitor switched on and off when needed. My Windows 7 desktop with it's 400 watt power supply is sitting mostly unused now. Ok there are some things that only a decent computer can do, but most of the time this very cheap setup is quicker and easier.
The stick only has 1 GB of ram though and that's really not enough. I keep having to uninstall apps to do something different. So a really good setup would be 2 or 3 GB and a touch screen. I've read that 'L' will have drivers for touch screen USB control so maybe next year there might be some cheap sticks with 'L' and a bit more RAM.
Pros:
Very cheap
Upgrading is easy - buy a new stick and log in!
No tedious Windows updates or antivirus or blue screens.
No waiting for boot up.
Silent, very low power and no heat output.
Cons:
It can be a bit slow with some things.
It won't run more complicated software.
Need to install a 'Null Keyboard' app so the soft keyboard doesn't keep popping up.
Don't have a £ key unless you switch back to the soft kb. Ok with $ though.
It plugs into the DVI port via a small HDMI adapter and I also found a small ethernet adapter that connects via the micro USB port with a short adapter, and to save straining the power from the stick I got an 8 point powered hub. These were all from ebay and very cheap and it all runs from one USB power supply. It does work really well. It took a short while to find how to do things with the mouse instead of a touch screen but it's easy, and most of the short-cut keys on the keyboard work too - home, email, search, ctrl-c, ctrl-v etc. With the ethernet hard wired accessing my NAS is easy too, so the 8 GB of storage on the stick isn't a problem. In fact I've set up a sync app to move anything downloaded to a folder on the NAS.
It's really cheap to run too, using a fraction of the power of a low wattage light bulb, so it can be just left on all the time and just the monitor switched on and off when needed. My Windows 7 desktop with it's 400 watt power supply is sitting mostly unused now. Ok there are some things that only a decent computer can do, but most of the time this very cheap setup is quicker and easier.
The stick only has 1 GB of ram though and that's really not enough. I keep having to uninstall apps to do something different. So a really good setup would be 2 or 3 GB and a touch screen. I've read that 'L' will have drivers for touch screen USB control so maybe next year there might be some cheap sticks with 'L' and a bit more RAM.
Pros:
Very cheap
Upgrading is easy - buy a new stick and log in!
No tedious Windows updates or antivirus or blue screens.
No waiting for boot up.
Silent, very low power and no heat output.
Cons:
It can be a bit slow with some things.
It won't run more complicated software.
Need to install a 'Null Keyboard' app so the soft keyboard doesn't keep popping up.
Don't have a £ key unless you switch back to the soft kb. Ok with $ though.
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