My tablet went "belly up"

[Gary RV_Wizard]

My 10 month old Motorola Xoom tablet went belly up the other day. Won't power up, let alone boot or do anything useful. Motorola will fix or replace it under warranty as long as there is no sign of physical abuse, so no problem there, but I wonder if  there might be a rash of such things now that millions of tablets are in use.  I found three other reports of Xooms with failures like mine in the last month alone...

Moto quickly sent me a free box with prepaid shipping to return it. And made a big deal about backing up my personal stuff first, but how to do that if it won't even power up? It won't even respond when I tether it to the desktop computer as a disk. Sigh.  Fortunately nearly everything on the tablet is easily replaceable, e.g. photos and music from my desktop system or phone, ebooks from Amazon and BN libraries, etc. Mostly it will just be the nuisance of figuring out what needs to be reinstalled and doing it.

And we didn't realize how accustomed we had become to using the tablet until we had to live without it for awhile.  Now Nancy and I spend more time vying for the use of the desk system. Maybe I'll have to dig the old laptop out of the closet until we get the Xoom back!

 

[Jim Godward]

Is the memory inaccessable so that it cannot be removed and read on another device??  Seems to me that with removable memory as effective and as cheap as it is, that would be the way they would go.

You can tell I know nothing about tablets! 

 

[FrankNichols]

Makes me glad to know my iPad is backed up to the "Cloud" just in case that happens here...

 

[rjf7g]

Imagine these things in the hands of 5-10 different users age 5-19 each day...many school districts are going the tablet route because they can buy a lot of them for limited money and they do provide a lot of utility.  But, how long will they last?  Most manufacturers are not discounting tablets for education and many do not offer extended warranties or management utilities.  Silicon snake oil or a solid investment to support digital age learning?  I guess only time will tell, but for now, my district is not diving in as much as we are dipping our toes in.

 

[rhmahoney]

the new ipads will be out in a month or so. Get the real thing instead of a poor copy. Like FrankNichols said, icloud backup is comforting.

 

[Gary RV_Wizard]

I removed the micro SD card, but there isn't much stored on it - just a video I took at Christmas and a few photos. Nearly everything is stored in the 32 GB solid state internal memory.

Most everything on the tablet is shared with my phone and my desktop system, so it's stored in three places. I use Dropbox as my "cloud storage".  I'd be the last one to deny that an iPad has some really nice "magic" embedded, but Androids have their own set of plusses (and minuses too).

 

[GreyHeads]

My 10 month old Motorola Xoom tablet went belly up the other day. Won't power up, let alone boot or do anything useful. Motorola will fix or replace it under warranty as long as there is no sign of physical abuse, so no problem there, but I wonder if  there might be a rash of such things now that millions of tablets are in use.  I found three other reports of Xooms with failures like mine in the last month alone...

Moto quickly sent me a free box with prepaid shipping to return it. And made a big deal about backing up my personal stuff first, but how to do that if it won't even power up? It won't even respond when I tether it to the desktop computer as a disk. Sigh.  Fortunately nearly everything on the tablet is easily replaceable, e.g. photos and music from my desktop system or phone, ebooks from Amazon and BN libraries, etc. Mostly it will just be the nuisance of figuring out what needs to be reinstalled and doing it.

And we didn't realize how accustomed we had become to using the tablet until we had to live without it for awhile.  Now Nancy and I spend more time vying for the use of the desk system. Maybe I'll have to dig the old laptop out of the closet until we get the Xoom back!

Gary,  I have both the xzoom and ipad  (employee gift from my company) and I am trying to find an ap that will store unlimited data to either one.  Drop Box only gives you 2gb.  And Evernote gives you X amount and then you have to wait for the following month to drop another X amount in to store.  Any apps you may know of that has unlimited storage?  Thanks.
Kathie

 

[Ned]

None of the online storage services will offer unlimited storage for free.  Most are 2GB, some 5GB, but all sell larger storage amounts.

 

[Marc L]

I have an iPhone that I backup to my laptop, I'm sure the equivalent is available for Android. 

Like Ned said, the could is only 5GB for free with Apple, so I would have to buy additional space.  We do the cloud to share data between our phones, but not as a full device backup.

 

[Ned]

When I connect my Droid Bionic to my computer using USB, it appears as 2 hard drives, one for the internal storage and one for the SD card.  I backup both of those to the computer periodically.

 

[Steve CDN]

None of the online storage services will offer unlimited storage for free.

I've recently discoverd Miscrosoft Skydrive, that provides 25 GB storage space along with 5 GB of synchronized storage space.  The service is cross platform, so people with iPads and Apple can use it as well as PC users.

If and when the 25 GB is used up, one can simply create another account.

Installation of Windows Live components is not necessary, however to use the Sync feature, Windows Live Mesh is required.  Also, to use the convenient drag and drop funtionality of Skydrive, Silverlight needs to be installed, but is not necessary to use Skydrive.

Skydrive contains web apps for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and One Note, so these respective documents can be created online without needing Microsoft Office installed on your computer; these documents and/or stored photos can be shared with specific permissions for editing if desired.

 

[FrankNichols]

5GB for free with Apple

Well, that is 5GB free after all your apps, music, books, and any other Itunes supplied content which is unlimited and free, so it only have to cover content you generate on the iPad.

Frank

 

[Gary RV_Wizard]

As Ned says, you can have as much "cloud" storage as you need, but you have to pay for it.  A few gigabytes, though, is probably enough for most unique content, since most stuff is already somewhere on the net or on another computer.

I actually don't "back up" very much stuff, but I do spread copies around for accessibility purposes.  Most things that I keep, I want accessible from whatever computing device I'm using, desktop, laptop, table or phone, so I either duplicate the data in each device or keep it in somewhere in the "cloud". And having it there also serves as a back-up in case of need.