Saturday, January 21, 2012

Refurbished Electronics

Since you can never have enough electronics, I bought a refurbished Asus Transformer tablet running Android 3.2. My thought was that I would configure it so my mom or dad can watch videos in their bedroom. Since Android supports Adobe Flash, there won't be as many problems with missing videos.

The unit arrived in a plain box. When I say plain, I mean no instructions and no documentation. WTF? It's supposed to have a 90 day warranty but there's nothing on paper. Great. After I unpacked it and plugged it in, I find that the battery won't charge. The battery was at 0% so it shut itself off after 3 minutes. I tried different USB power adapters to verify each component and everything seems to work. Then suddenly the unit decided to charge and got to ~81% before stopping. I can transfer files to/from my PC so the cable works. The power adapter will charge my iPad so the unit itself must be busted. It has stopped charging again and the battery is now down to 15%. If I unplug it, a warning message pops up telling me to plug it back in... but when I do, the charge indicator does not change and it continues to discharge. Strange.

Sigh... it looks like I will need to call Tiger Direct to return then item. Such a hassle... I'm not buying anything from Asus ever again.

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Spoke with Asus Tech Support and determined that the battery was busted in the tablet. The rep wanted me to send the unit in for repair. I told him that I only had it for 3 days and I'm not sending it in for repair. Fortunately Tiger Direct agreed to refund me the purchase so I have to make a trip to UPS and send the unit back.

Now I need to decide if I still want to buy the same unit (probably not) or try something else.

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