Hardware build quality

Our recent tablet purchases included two Lenovo ThinkPad Tablets (1838-2BG).  First impressions were excellent – we liked the pen/stylus functionality particularly and the build quality seemed quite robust. We have used the tablets for only 1 week so far.

Unfortunately, a serious problem was identified when setting one of the tablets to charge one night.  I plugged the USB Micro B power supply into the port when the tablet was still powered on and noted the battery symbol did not switch to the “AC Charging” symbol.  So I powered down the tablet just in case the battery was so depleted that it needed some quality charging time.

I checked on the tablet later and noticed it hadn’t charged at all and the AC adapter plug was cold instead of warm, indicating the power supply was not working.  Fearing a faulty cable I checked it for damage, kinks or other physical abnormalities but it all seemed fine.  I then checked the USB port itself because it felt unusually ‘loose’.

It was quite difficult to see what could be wrong but I compared the port with my Android smartphone which also uses a USB Micro B port.  I could then see that the pins had lost their mount and were still attached to the inside, but loose.    

A little Googling uncovered a 15 page thread on the Lenovo Forums entitled: Warranty refused : broken USB port   

Some quotes:

Ok, this is the final straw for our company’s rollout of these tablets.

After 3 days use, the internal USB pins broke on the tablet.  Lenovo have said this is a consumer issue and not warranty and will effectively charge the full cost of a new tablet to “repair”.  - by justguy

I got my 18382BG five weeks ago. From the start the charger only worked when tilted slightly upwards. Now the black pice inside the micro usb broke off and came out with the charger. I am used to chargers like these from other tablets and cell phones and never had an issue and never misused any of them. – by knochentrocken

I don’t want to be alarmed, but we’ve just received an order of 700 of these after a too short trial period. We are in education after all. About 30 teachers have used them for a week, and four report charging issues. I have only looked at one so far. The one has broken USB pins. I’ll check the others shortly. These are adults. Can’t wait for students to get them next week. – by tcarter0

Lenovo support staff have also contributed to this thread, helping those who initially had warranty refused on this issue.  Apparently the Lenovo warranty repair centres have been notified to treat USB issues as in-warranty.  We shall soon see for ourselves!

A telephone conversation with Steve Gordon at our closest Lenovo Warranty Service Provider – Computerworld Wales in Cardiff – directed me to Lenovo UK Tech Support. We are awaiting the label and packaging to be sent so we can call the courier for collection.

Looking up the warranty for the device has also highlighted a separate issue.  Even though we have only owned the tablets for a week, the 12 month warranty expires in October 2012 (only 8 months left)!

A quick call to LaptopsDirect Customer Service confirmed that the warranty commences from the manufacture date unless proof of purchase is provided.

A solution to contract required paperwork in a digital age

This weekend I have been playing with some Android apps.  Yes, a shiny new tablet encourages me to take my work home!

Earlier this week Leia had converted one of our review forms for use with the app Documents To Go. This was a great solution but the designer in me was niggled by some loss of formatting and even though I didn’t see a print out, I guessed it might not be as nice as our current forms, which had the full functionality of Microsoft Word.

This had me wondering if there was a signature capture app which could be combined with forms. Wouldn’t that be fantastic, to use the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet pen to capture those all important signatures?

After testing a bunch of apps and devising a few work arounds when the free apps didn’t do quite what I was looking for, I finally stumbled upon the SignNow App.

It will allow us to use any of our previous documentation, whether it is a Word doc or template or PDF and add text and the all important signature, before saving it or emailing it to others, e.g the learner and employer.  How fab is that?

First major challenge – Personalisation

So far we’ve tethered the two ten inch tablets to the accounts of the two assessors who’ll be using them but have dithered somewhat over how to link accounts to the seven inch device which we want to lend out.  Tablets seem clearly designed to be used as 1:1 devices and almost all the apps we use ned to be tethered to user accounts.  For now we’ve tied the Marketplace to a generic student account so we can get the apps installed and will probably just go through the hoops of altering accounts if  needed.  What we had hoped to do was lend them out to students for blocks of time of say a month to gather workplace evidence then try the same with different students but this looks as though it’s going to involve a lot of reconfiguring.  We’ll see.  I can see this being a major challenge for small providers where funding to provide literally 1:1 devices is fairly unlikely.

It’s almost essential for devices in an educational context to be shareable without excessive time spent configuring.  I can see why so many of the schools doing it have gone the route of supporting learners to get their own devices rather than buying in school sets as the following two examples show.

While they do cost financially, iPads are proving to save the district money in a number of ways. Of course, paper costs have been substantially reduced. Hooker documents some of the savings in a recent blog post (http://eaneswifi.blogspot.com/2011/10/swiss-army-knife-of-education.html), noting savings on document cameras, video cameras, still cameras, and newer mobile laptop carts. Even apps themselves are much less expensive than software we might have purchased for the same function. They are also saving teacher time—valuable this year when our budgets have been reduced, and teachers are tasked with more responsibilities. Having a common device, and being able to access email, grades, student documents and create lessons all portably, has really improved the workflow for teachers across the campus.

One of the questions the district faced initially was regarding personalization. While the iPad can work somewhat effectively as part of a “cart” setup, the most powerful use of the tool is as a personal device. So as a district, we chose to allow both students and teachers to make the devices their own and rolled out a limited set of consistent agreed-upon apps across campus. (We are using Apple’s Volume Purchase Program for additional apps that various departments or campuses need or want for their curriculum.) While this might pose a dilemma for some districts, it has created a tremendous sense of ownership as students and staff customize it for their own learning needs and classroom use.

Evolution of a 1:1 iPad Program

Student ownership. We had the choice early on to either externalize ownership to the students or keep the ownership of the machines on the books of the school. In our case – and after much study – we decided to externalize the cost and have families purchase their laptops through the school. We provide financing options to our families. As a private school we have this opportunity. I realize that in many public schools the machines must be school-owned. In visiting with other schools who have school-owned 1:1 programs, the breakage rates seem to be higher. In general our breakage rates have come in below expected numbers for the students. Yet, interestingly, the staff break their machines at a rate four times that of students. If our students want to put stickers and other stuff all over the machine, they can have at it.

Reflecting on a Year of 1:1

A similar problem in a corporate envrionment with smartphones is being researched by VMWare at the moment and their solution of running various virtual machines on the same device might turn out to be the slickest solution.  Eseopcially since Android itself appears to have no immediate plans to support multiuser.

Settings for usability

Spent a bit of time fiddling with the settings as there were some slightly odd choices.  The wifi on the Lenovos appears to have a tendency to switch itself off and not come back to life properly when the tablet goes to sleep.  The annoying thing is it doesn’t actually report dropping the connection – the icon stays lit – you just lose connectivity.  Disabling and reenabling the wifi cures it.  Until next time! The advanced network settings were buried somewhat and we had to look them up to find the possible fix.  Switching off the option to disable wifi when sleeping will hopefully cure it.  There was also an option to never disable it when connected to a particular SSID.

Another setting which looked useful but rather baffled me was the automatic brightness option.  (And for ‘automatic’ read ‘random!).   In theory this automatically sets the brightness based on the ambient light levels.  In practice it made the screen fade to dim at random moments and after doing some background reading might also have been responsible for the screen blackout during setup which I’d put down to not giving it a thourough enough charge before starting.

None of these issues are really deal breakers especially as both assessors using the devices are fairly comfortable with IT issues, but they could be offputting when giving the devices to less confident users.

More on recording with the Lenovo…

Still potching with trying to get a decent recording I resorted to the little ‘map’ of where everything is and discovered the mic pickup is beside the lens for the front facing camera – i.e Flat on the desk when using the rear camera!

Another experiment with it carefully uncovered gave somewhat better results.  And using the front facing camera works fairly well.

Rear facing camera with mic unobstructed!

 

And using the front facing camera as we might in an observation.

Looking at the Lenovo tablets

This is a quick combination of trying out the video feature and looking at the first tablet choices we’ve bought in (A Lenovo Thinkpad tablet 10inch).

It came out very quiet so sorry about that-  Should have experimented with the mic setting first probably.  Hopefully it will work without a dedicated mic – recording ad hoc videos is one of the main things we want to do with them!  I also need to keep my eyes open until AFTER stopping the recording.

Well, some fiddling with the setting on the in built mic has not produced much improvement which is a shade disappointing.  It’s a bit better with the dedicated audio recording software and with the clip on collar mic that came with it, but the need to faff with that could be a drawback when using it for recording learners in the workplace and definitayel for doing recorded discussions with more than one person which is one of the main uses we hope to put it to.  I don’t think it’s the Lenovo specifically here – the little Acer that I only just started playing with has the same issue.

This is from the Lenovo using Soundcloud with the clip on mic.

 

In fact my phone seems to pick up better than either.  Perhaps by the nature of it – phones being designed to talk on after all!  Below clip is from my phone (Samsung Galaxy Ace with Soundcloud, no mic)

On the plus side the web access is very good on the Lenovo, all the various media, embedded calendars, video, Prezis all play without fuss.  Should be an interesting few months getting these embedded.

 

Upgrading to enable M-Learning

During our research into mobile Apps – The Wanted List we discovered we needed to upgrade Moodle and Mahara.

The much awaited official Moodle Android App is due for release any moment and requires Moodle 2.1 or higher.  Additionally Moodle 2.2 onwards has the MyMobile theme especially designed for mobile devices.  The bad news was our Moodle was lagging behind on version 2.0.4.  At the time of our last upgrade Moodle 2.1.1 was available but would not work on our webserver because it requires PHP 5.3.2 and we were restricted to PHP 5.2.

Fortunately, our web host, United Hosting had announced they were due to upgrade the servers from 5.2 to 5.3 on 10th January, so we upgraded to the latest Moodle 2.2.1 on 16th January.

Everything went smoothly with the upgrade  With a little bit of configuring the MyMobile theme also works very well – though we needed to adjust the fixed width of the Google Calender and will also need to redesign graphical navigation so all elements adapt well to various screen widths.

We also upgraded to the latest Mahara 1.4.1 which supports the MaharaDroid app. MaharaDroid enables Android phones to share or upload content to Mahara and requires a minimum of Mahara 1.4.

Unfortunately we are experiencing a few browser and operational inconsistencies with the latest version of Mahara, particularly with regard to editing uploaded files in Portfolio Pages.  We are investigating:

• Firefox 9.0.1: On some PCs the edit buttons not working on File uploads (but inconsistency between alike versions)
• Chrome 16.0.912.75: Edit and Select buttons not working in the File uploads

These 2 issues also trigger a set of PHP errors:

[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/errors.php:464) An exception was thrown of class PieformException.
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/errors.php:464) THIS IS BAD and should be changed to something extending MaharaException,
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/errors.php:464) unless the exception is from a third party library.
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/errors.php:464) Original trace follows
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/pieforms/pieform.php:528) No function registered to handle form submission for form "files"
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] Call stack (most recent first):
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] * Pieform->__construct(array(size 12)) at /home/administrator2/public_html/mahara/lib/pieforms/pieform.php:161
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] * Pieform::process(array(size 12)) at /home/administrator2/public_html/mahara/lib/pieforms/pieform.php:71
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] * pieform(array(size 12)) at /home/administrator2/public_html/mahara/artefact/file/index.php:38
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53]

The Mahara Bugtracker does not list these issues – the closest bug being Bug #891436 which mentions the same PHP errors.  I have made small customised changes to the Resume artefact as documented here, but I do not think it is at all related, so I will submit our own bug report.

Out of interest the demo Mahara site http://demo.mahara.org/ does not have the same issue using the same browsers, but I am not unable to confirm if the Mahara version is exactly the same version 1.4.1.

Also identified this bug:

• Internet Explorer 7 to 9: Hyperlinks to uploaded content on portfolio pages only click-able on baseline of text.

And this is replicable on the demo Mahara website – this bug also needs submitting to Mahara Bugtracker.

Update

Reported to Bugtracker

Summary				Importance	Status	Heat
	918262	Clicking links to uploaded files in Page view using Internet Explorer		Undecided	New
	918259	Select and Edit files in Chrome and sometimes Firefox – different to Bug #819102?		Undecided	New

Further Troubleshooting

I updated Bug #918259 to reflect the fact that it wasn’t a bug after all.  The problem was caused by missing or corrupt files in the folder mahara/lib/pieforms.  :-)