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My New Road Computer

10 Comments

Some may remember a couple months ago, when I was in Florida, I was trying an iPad with bluetooth keyboard and mouse, to see if it was acceptable. It turned out that Apple frowns on mice with iPads. Monday, I went out and bought an ASUS ZenPad 10, with Android 6.0, and it seems to be working, but there is a weird problem. The right button on the mouse doesn’t give a menu; it acts like a back button. Which makes it impossible (for example) to open a link in a new tab. Anyone have any idea what the deal is?

10 thoughts on “My New Road Computer”

  1. There are a couple of less-than-helpful notes out on the web:

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/android-on-the-desktop-not-really-good-but-better-than-youd-think/

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10041295/android-usb-mouse-right-click-correct-behaviour-ics/29311126#29311126

    Seems like it’s down to the OS and the app developers. That’s a kind of obnoxious behavior.

    I’m sure you’ve probably thought about a Chromebook; I’ve got an Asus Chromebook Flip that goes all over with me, but it’s heavier than a typical tablet. Right click works as expected, though, and most Android apps are just fine.

  3. My current mobile computing device is a chromebook, run in developer mode. Runs android apps very nicely, and with crouton I can run an almost standard linux Xorg environment in chroot along side the chromeOS. And since it uses a celeron processor, in the linux chroot I can run wine. So I can run programs designed for 4 different operating systems on the same device, without rebooting.

    I just wish the device didn’t gripe very loudly on every reboot that I’m not running the much less capable standard mode.

    1. As of very recently, the semi-proprietary Crossover version of Wine for Android is available on x86 android-capable chromebooks. Assuming that gives strong sandboxing it’ll be a neat option if/when it works well (not yet, by early reports…)

  6. I got the zen book, so can’t help other than saying Asus makes a fine product at a very affordable price tag.

  7. ASUS and Lenovo are both nice PC laptop manufacturers. Personally I got an Acer though. Just because it was dirt cheap. Not that very good otherwise though. Just for the bang for the buck. Both ASUS and Acer are backed by the largest Taiwanese PC OEMs there named Pegatron and Quanta. They basically manufacture most of the other brand PC devices you see including Apple’s or HP’s. Foxconn isn’t that good at PC manufacturing they are mostly big on the smartphone business although they work in every segment as well.

    1. I mixed up Quanta with Winstron. I forgot that Quanta doesn’t have their own brand products they just do OEM work. The only way to buy a computer from them IIRC is if you are someone like Google who can order machines in bulk.

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