[Amamba]

Never thought I'd go that route, as I used to love the customization available on Android. We did get an iPad 3 for my wife, but I bought Nexus 7 for myself, another one was a birthday gift for our daughter, and my wife's relatively new Kindle Fire went to our son. And of course both my wife and I are using android phones.

A year later... The Nexii are suffering from a major slowdown introduced with 4.2 update. To the point of being useless. The following two updates made them a bit faster, but still very laggy and now it seems they may be suffering from a memory chip degradation. Also the internal power connectors on both devices have to be taped in place (opening the device) as they would get loose with time.

The Kindle Fire was a great device but the charging port got lose after just over a year of use. Apparently a widespread problem causes by bad design. Can't be soldered back in place as it's a press fit connector. Amazon's response ? "We'll sell you a refurb for $149... Yes it's the same connector design". No way. You know, full me twice...

Ok, no problem - my friend bought that great Transformer tablet he was so happy about, I already realized I need to go higher up the food chain to get better quality. So I called my friend to get his opinion and he told me to stay way from Asus. He ran into some major hardware problems with screen. And that's not a cheap tablet.

Oh, and my Android phone - a very good phone, with gorgeous screen, powerful, good battery... Except that it died 7 months into the ownership. As in, black screen of death. I could reboot it, but if it went to sleep, it wouldn't wake up. According to Sprint tech, a fairly common problem possibly related to power fluctuations between the internal battery and the main board, the phone had to be replaced, luckily they only charged me $35. (And yes, I tried everything from hard resets to custom ROM before that).

All that time, the only device that reliably worked since purchase was my wife's iPad. And my neighbor has the original iPad he bought used, abused by two kids, and still perfectly operational.

So in a leap of faith, I gave my Nexus 7 to my son (since he can't use the Kindle Fire as it won't charge) and bought Mini Retina 32gb wifi. Hopefully I can just use it, with whatever stupid OS limitations Apple has, instead of chasing lags and hardware failures and resets. Starting to think that Android = hardware lottery.