Electric Objects EO2
I just bought an Electric objects EO2. First impressions:
- It's exactly as pretty as I was hoping for. Which is to say, very pretty.
- It's heavier than I was expecting. I'm renting, and I'm not quite ready right now to put the holes in the wall that mounting it would require (though the instructions and mounting kit are themselves lovely). Someone thought about this, and the frame has lovely little grippy feet on the bottom so it props up nicely against the wall and doesn't feel unsteady at all.
- Auto-brightness is off by default. The lowest brightness setting still feels a little high, but that might just be my perception of it because it's so new. Update 4 days later: Nope, brightness is perfect. It never feels like it's glowing too much, and the lowest setting when the room lights are out is very low indeed.
- Anything animated that's not really subtle drives me crazy. I've never been able to handle having a moving screen in my peripheral vision, and this absolutely counts. But tiny subtle animations are just lovely. Before it arrived I'd assumed that I would almost resent using what is essentially a computer to display still jpegs, so I'd stockpiled nice animations, but in practice it displays those jpegs so well that I'm just as happy with still images.
- The iOS app for photo and playlist management is... functional. I imagine that I won't be using it a lot as I settle into the things I like, but initial setup is a drag of stuttering scrolling and loading screens.
And here are the nerdy developer things I wanted to know before I bought it:
- It's an Android device, running some AOSP-like fork of 4.4.2. No Google Play Services, obviously.
- There's a micro-USB socket on the back of it, and ADB, etc, work just fine. "adb shell" gets you a root shell.
- You can side-load anything you feel like.