The Smartcast Tablet

I mentioned in my post about buy our new television that we couldn’t use the smart TV functions because our tablets didn’t have the right version of android. But since we didn’t really need those functions, we decided to go ahead and shop for new tablets that did have the right version, but to wait until we were ready to purchase.

Betsy mentioned this week that she had seen better tablets than the one she has for about $100 online — about half of what she paid for her current tablet. So we decided to look over Best Buy and Sam’s club tablet selections to see things in person.

Betsy’s tablet has an 8 GB memory that translates to about 5 GB usable. She was wanting one with 16 GB so she would get 8 GB of usable memory.

When we got to Best Buy we found several tablets, but none of them were in the $100 range she saw online, and we didn’t find many with the 16GBs.

But when we got to Sam’s club we saw a 32GB 8 inch screen tablet running Android 6 (we needed at least 4.4) for $60 — the NuVision Solo 8. It was the last one: Nothing was on display, and there was a ticket for the last one to be pulled from the case. We asked the workers in the electronics section if they could pull it for us to look at, before we bought. They did, we looked the box over, and decide to pick up such a good deal.

Of course, that led to the purchase of a cover for it ( $6 bargain version) and micro SD card (2-pack for $26 — 32GB each).

We hadn’t meant to purchase today, but the find of a buy better than what we wanted — both in capability and price — fed the purchase impulse earlier than intended, but not

When we got the Tablet home, it did everything the other tablet did, only faster and better. It was indeed the find purchase we thought it was.

Betsy loaded everything she had before on it, and tested everything out. Last of all she downloaded the Vizio Smartcast App. This time it downloaded, as it didn’t on the old tablet. But when she got to the “get started” button, the app asked to turn location services on. We said yes, and it returned to the “get started” screen. So we pressed “get started” again. It asked to turn on location services, which were now on. Nothing we could do seemed to change it. We tried all the steps of turning tablet on and of, uninstalling and reinstalling the app, etc.

Our current hypothesis is that the tablet does not have GPS, and somehow the Vizio Smartcast requires GPS. We do not know this is true — we are fairly certain the tablet doesn’t have GPS, but wonder why the Vizio Smartcast app would require it. Betsy says if the tablet doesn’t have something the app needs, ti shouldn’t have downloaded, like the download was blocked on the original tablet.

So we will have to wait until support is open tomorrow to see whether the device can do it, or whether we have another tablet that isn’t fully supported to be used as a Smartcast remote.

But either way, the tablet is good for everything else Betsy wanted in a replacement, but we’ll keep it. The question only is, what will it take to get a tablet that can be our smart tv remote.