On 08/02/13 23:15, LUG wrote:
> We are going to be driving to Scotland to visit the in-laws in summer and
> accompanying us will be our (by then) year old son. He has recently
> discovered the joy of The Tweenies and other CBeebies based entertainment
> (or rather, we have discovered that said programs will keep him quiet long
> enough for us to make his next meal and/or tidy up the previous one) so I
> have started investigating if there is a fairly economical way of playing
> programs in the car with the hope of making the 8+ hour journey slightly
> more pleasant for all of us.
>
Ahh happy days. I used to take a netbook on holiday with us, full of
CBeebies stuff to keep the kids entertained while mummy & daddy got
ready to go out in the evening :)
> I have seen the screens attached to the back of headrests in cars and I'm
> not sure if these are portable DVD players or portable MP4 type players.
They can be both. Some just take an SD card or USB drive full of media
and you choose what to play via an on screen display.
> Firstly, his car seat is rear-facing so this would need to be something
> that would attach to the head-rest on the back seat, which is a different
> shape to the front head rests.
Some of the ones I've seen come with various adjustable straps so you
can probably mount it on the back headrest somehow.
> Secondly, both of the above devices are obviously very limited in their
> functionality which got me on to thinking about buying a tablet so that we
> could at least use it for other purposes after the journey.
>
Cheap (i.e. non-Apple) tablets tend to have terrible speakers. If your
car stereo has an input jack you could maybe run a simple cable from the
headphone out of the tablet to the input of the stereo and pan it to the
rear speakers.
> If not, what are people's general recommendations for reasonably cheap
> tablets (by that I mean something under or around £100)?
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_16gb
If you're going to use it for more than just this car journey then I
wouldn't get a really cheapo one. The Nexus 7 is out of budget
(currently £159) but you might be able to pick up an 8GB one cheaper as
they no longer sell them so some people might be offloading them to upgrade.
> A quick look on ebay brings up several Blackberry Playbooks going for about
> £80 and they look to have a pretty good spec but the number for sale and
> the low price makes me slightly suspicious.
>
The benefit the playbook has it the speakers are on the front/side. The
Nexus 7 (and some others) have them on the back.
Cheers,
--
Alan Pope
Engineering Manager
Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope@???
http://ubuntu.com/
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