Now I’m 29… time really does fly!

// October 29th, 2011 // General

Well this is it… my 29th birthday! (cue cake!) So what did I get? Before I get into that, I want to share a revelation with you.

If there’s anything that I’ve realised as I’ve gotten older, it’s that you look forward to your birthday less and less as each year goes by. This isn’t to say that I dread my birthday when it comes along – in fact I still enjoy them – but they’re not filled with the excitement and wonderment that you used to get when you were a kid. It’s the same with any other kind of celebration or holiday that you encounter each year.

For example: Easter, when you’re a child, was a holiday where you got two weeks off school and all the chocolate you could eat. However, as an adult, it doesn’t really mean anything new. You don’t get time off unless you book it, and chocolate doesn’t have the same appeal as it used to. Sure, you’ll still get eggs for your close friends but more often than not you also get an egg for yourself just so you feel as though you’re taking part in the festivities.

Christmas as well… as an adult, usually you’re earning money throughout the year (I say “usually” becuase there’re over 2.4 million people unemployed in the UK at the moment) so, if there’s anything that you want, you’ll simply go out and buy it. Also, as an adult, you’re expected to buy gifts for others… others who are also in the same situation as you (being able to buy what they really want during the year). This makes Christmas difficult when you’re all grown up. You have to think long and hard about every gift you’re going to buy for people who would’ve bought them anyway if they really wanted them. When you’re a child, you don’t worry about buying gifts for others; you simply receive them. Without having a proper salary, you’re limited to relying on handouts at key points of the year, which I believe makes kids more excited about Christmas time more than anything else.

This neatly leads me to something I’ve been excited about getting though. I’ve wanted to get myself a Android tablet for the last couple of months, ever since I encountered a collegue’s 7″ Samsung tablet when I used to work at Zimo recently. I’d been looking at really cheap tablets – round about the £70-140 mark – but I haven’t been able to get one as my income had been an issue throughout 2011. Now though, I’ve got myself a new job that I feel am REALLY suited to, and my income has now become steady again. Nonetheless, I still wasn’t sure about those cheap tablets, as my collegue at Zimo suggested getting one that could be updated. I also liked the idea of a 7″ tablet over the usual 10″ tablets you find people using (i.e. the iPad) as it’s more portable.

When I drove up to visit my folks for my birthday, I was surprised to find that my parents already had a modern Android tablet: The Asus Transformer. I’ve spent hours browsing the internet on it and exploring the settings and so on, and found it such a joy to use! For all of the above reasons, I was lead to the Acer Iconia A100.

Acer Iconia A100

I used the cash that I got for my birthday to buy this beauty just earlier today! It’s a 7″ Android Honeycomb (3.2) tablet with 8Gb built-in storage, twin cameras, capacitive high-resolution touch-screen display, and an array of different inputs and outputs. It ticks every single box and then some (in fact, it’s probably more capable than I was looking for). It’s so much fun to use as well, and I’ve learnt it will be updated to Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) when it comes out too.

This is going to take a huge load off my aging Nokia N97. Up until now, my N97 was used for everything… music, video, internet browsing, email, and so on. Now I can take a lot of these responsibilities away so that it won’t run so sluggishly as it does now. I think I might even go ahead and factory reset my phone to get it to run much faster too.

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