I. Want. To. Read. Books. This tablet is not a computer. This tablet is a book. My family has purchased books which are locked in the Amazon ecosystem. I want to read the books using a book interface, that is, I want a rectangle with words and/or images on it. I don't want a rounded rect or a circle. I don't want holes in my book. I don't want it to be defaced with black marks, or blank gray boxes containing blank white boxes, or a little bar containing the time. I just want a book.
This is surprising to me. Based on my experience with their Windows PCs, I assumed Lenovo would be a v basic Android OEM and not fuck with shit like, say, Samsung would. In fact, the Settings on this device claims it isn't even running Android, but "Lenovo ZUI 16.0.070 Stable". This appears to be just Android, but with pen support (the pen support is nice) and *multiple* missing features in the settings (not just the taskbar).
I was expecting Lenovo to disappoint me but wasn't expecting *that*.
Although I like this form factor better than the Fire I was considering getting instead (I wish it were 8x11 sized instead of 16x9 sized, but the larger size is better for my eyes), I'm at this moment considering returning this simply to avoid the gray bar at the bottom of the screen. Apparently if you buy a tablet from *Google*, there's a "disable taskbar" feature in the Settings. Lenovo, for no reason anyone understands, removed this. Check Google and you'll find hundreds of annoyed comments.
Ok, I'm complaining a lot but one last thing. I want to show you what I mean by Lenovo's patched Android being "Buggy".
I bring down Quick Settings. There's a little "edit" button in the corner. I want to configure my Q.S., so I tap it (it's small, it takes a couple tries). This takes me to
A gray line.
Q.S. is replaced with a gray line. I can move it down and up but I can't go back. I can no longer access Q.S. or my notifications. The only way to get out of this state is to *reboot*. Really.
Based on that, despite again the form factor and weight distribution and price all being quite good, I currently recommend avoiding the Lenovo Tab M11, because in addition to their Android repackaging being very buggy in strange ways they just fucking delete shit out of Android at random, and how are you supposed to predict whether one of the things they deleted is one of the things you depend on?
I guess tomorrow I'll try to see how much of a normal Android experience I can recreate using ADB.
Okay one thing I will say about this damn Tab M11 is that the speaker is actually *quite* good. This might just be my primary way of listening to Tidal now.
Bass stood up mediocre at best to the Roni Size Matter of Fact test but eh, what do you expect
As you can see in the video, closing + reopening the quick settings/notification shade doesn't fix it. Only reboot fixes it.
Nowwww, I guess I should admit: While experimenting with this, I found it's not an out of box behavior of the edit button. Rather, it is specific to "disable animations" accessibility mode, which I run enabled. So this is *less* of a jaw-dropping QA process slip than it appears.
But wow! "Enabling accessibility options can softlock the OS" is kinda a bad failure mode!!
Also on every tablet NOT made by lenovo, there's just plain a "disable taskbar" option. So why would anyone be asking about this.
The closest to people asking about this are all Samsung users who say they fixed a problem similar to this with the "Good Lock" app. But that is Samsung exclusive?
Okay so going at the "can I get the NORMAL NAV BUTTONS INSTEAD OF HAVING THEM REPEATEDLY MOVE LEFT AND RIGHT" problem (which I really might just return this tablet if I can't figure it out) now
It's hard to search for because tons of people try to enable the taskbar on a *phone* but I appear the first person to want to *disable* it, I assume because I'm the first person who cares about computers who has ever purchased an Android tablet. Possibly the first person to buy an Android tablet period.
Incidentally, another thing I'd consider an option— although not necessarily my preferred option— is if I could go with the gesture navigation, but change it so the back gesture is something other than a side-pull, or like a side-pull and hold or something. I cannot function without having my side-pull gesture inside of apps, plus in my testing left swipes nowhere near the border get interpreted as back gestures.
Some "posts" refer to a "swipe gesture sensitivity" setting but idk what this is.
The two settings in "global" are the ones that Lenovo exposes to me— they're already off and aren't important. I guess the most helpful thing here would be if someone with a non-Lenovo Android tablet could try doing `adb shell settings list system` and `adb shell settings list secure` before and after toggling the Settings ➜ Display ➜ Taskbar option, and diffing the results. (Or just grepping both for "task" and eyeballing it.) However this seems unlikely since again, nobody uses Android tablets
Incidentally, a friend with an old Samsung mentions their Samsung has this second option for nav gestures, where the three standard nav bar buttons are replaced with three swipe-up-from-bottom areas. For the tablet environment, that is actually really nice! I would enable that if I could! It is apparently 100% Samsung exclusive and also, on the newer Samsungs it's been removed.
The Android evil-genie promise: You may have an open source phone OS. But if you actually compile it from source yourself, you will be banned from running any software. Or at least, they'll try as hard as they can to ban you from running software. Also, if you decide you want to build or even *download* the source, you're going to need to purchase a dedicated 1 TB SSD to check out the repo, and also download our forked version of git to check it out with
@mntmn when using a laptop, I find it overwhelmingly most convenient to plug in headphones and speak to the mic in the laptop. However 1. I don't know if I'd expect the same things of the Reform as other devices, due to eg form factor. 2. I do own a bluetooth headset, and 3. Half the time I wind up plugging in an external mic anyway for sound quality… I find the "mics are a threat" point compelling, so I don't know what I'd recommend.
Watching this WhistlinDiesel video and there's a good bit partway through where some cows just show up. It's not clear whose cows they are. The vloggers seem really confused about this and claim in the video that the cows aren't theirs
@foone There's a *very* long running storyline in QC about a robot who had built a really strong self image around her chassis and then it got broke, and when the insurance gave her a new one it turned out like, oh the iPhone 7 is discontinued, here's the iPhone 9, it's better. But it didn't look the same so she wound up with actual body dysmorphia because she looked in the mirror and it *wasn't her face*.