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I Hate Bastadroids.

Should have listened to the wife. "Buy an iPad" she says. "No", says I, "Androids are more popular so why spend £600 on an iJobs that's incompatible with the rest of the world when I can spend £150 on a tablet that's faster and does everything any iJobs can do - and it's part of Google not Jobble".

Big mistake! (But don't tell her)

We'd already experimented with a Samsung Galaxy Android phone and gave up trying to sync it with Outlook (let alone get it to dial a phone number). Everything seemed deliberately hidden behind fiddly little pictures and horrible little icons that suggested nothing. Swiping and clicking and dragging and tossing in the air and shaking it and using a combination of feet, hands and shouting at it to see if there was some hidden control to make it do things I thought it might, drove us mad. We sent it back to Vodafone and paid over the top, again, for another iJobs.

But I wasn't going to be sucked into an iPad. Oh no, I was going to wait for an Ice-cream Sandwich or Fruit Salad or whatever the latest Android bollocks was called, on a Nexus, Fire HD, or perhaps something called an Ainol from Amazon - The fastest, cheapest and best reviewed 7" tablet!

You guessed. I had to own a tablet called an Ainol. It arrived yesterday. It only took 24 hours for me to hate it with all my heart and soul. Here are a few of the reasons it is so loathsome:

  • Unlike an iJobs, nothing is obvious. Stuff just disappears and then re-appears for no apparent reason. Finding your way around it is like trying to remove your own appendix in the dark using a spoon and an axe - only more painful.
  • I downloaded Kindle for Android. It worked! I can see most of the books I 'rent' from Amabezos. I bought a copy of The Week (my favourite mag). I can see it on my iPhone, but it doesn't appear on my Bastadroid. Message to Kindle Support: "Why...". Instant (!) reply telling me that not everything on Kindle works on Androids. It's down to each publisher to decide which device to support. They don't tell you this when you buy, sorry rent, the item.
  • I download Google Movie Player. I buy a movie from Google Play Store. See, Google, Google, Google on a Google powered device. I try to play said movie. "Can't fetch license (error 43)". What fucking license?? I GOOGLE the error message to discover I'm "rooting", whatever the fuck that is, and Google now prevent movies you buy on their store from being played on devices that "root". I don't want to fucking "root" (well not with my Bastadroid, anyway). So I send a "help" email from the Bastadroid... and then tried to see my email from the thing...
  • Only to discover that it doesn't want to connect to my email Exchange server and gives me some other fucking unintelligible error message about something to do with certificates.
Given up. Off to Gatwick for half-term. Going to buy an iJobs at the airport. Bet it goes horribly right.
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