Saturday, November 30, 2013

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0: The User Guide part 1

Frailty, thy name is woman.

Well, I went to Sam's Club today with my brand new Visa Freedom credit card, because I'd seen a commercial for a Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 (well, some kind of Galaxy tablet, not sure which one) and decided I wanted one, and this new credit card would allow me to make a purchase and not have to pay interest on it for 10 months or so.

I wanted the Galaxy because I like the name - but I'm already sort of regretting my choice - for the same price I could have got an IPad 2 which had twice the screen size. But, I went with my first choice.

Unfortunately, Sam's Club doesn't take Visa cards!

Right then and there I should have heeded my own advice, I didn't really need the thing. But if I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 (I'm repeating the name for SEO purposes, so that Google will hopefully rank this post high for anyone searching for that "search phrase" then I could write articles about it and perhaps recoup my investment.

Sam's Club was having a special, get an in-store credit card, and get $40 off any purchase of $100 or more. Of course their credit card charges 22% interest on balances, but since I don't intend to carry a balance...

So I applied and was accepted. Of course. (They don't care about your credit score or anything, these credit card companies. They'll give anyone a card - perhaps unless your credit score is absolute garbage...)

So I bought the tablet, brought it home, and plugged it in to charge up the battery.

Part 1: Where to find the 8 GB micro SD card (memory for storage) and the S pen

While the battery was charging, I searched high and low in the packaging for the SD card and the S pen and couldn't find them anywhere.

The manual was of little help - it's a tiny thing. Which is why I am operating on the assumption that all new users of this device are going to have some of the same problems I had and probably will have, and so this User Manual for the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 will be published over several posts.

I finally found where the SD card was supposed to go, opened it up (it's a flimsy thing, and glanced in and didn't see anything. I also didn't expect it to be already installed .... but it was. When I looked inside that slot again it was there. Since it's black, it wasn't easy to see the first time. It's like an SD card for a camera - you press it in to insert it, and you press it again to remove it. So I pressed it back in and closed it up.

But I still didn't know where the S pen was. I tried to search online for the phrase "Where is the S pen in the packaging for the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0, and saw a picture of someone using the pen, and it looked like the pen was attached to the device by a USB cord of some kind.

So I thought, well, I've been cheated out of my pen.

And I emailed support and asked them where it was.

And five minutes later I thought, well...  and I turned the tablet over.

And there in nice big print was the icon for the pen - it inserted into a little hole in the device itself. And there was an icon for the SD card as well.

And so of course I felt pretty stupid.

But if the "manual" (I use that term loosely - it's a "Quick Start Guide") had just said, "The pen is in a slot in the device itself" I wouldn't have had a problem. The Guide features a picture of the device and arrows with numbers pointing to where things are, and No. 9 is S Pen slot, but just because it has a slot doesn't imply that the pen is in the slot! (In the past, I've had things shipped that were separate and you had to install them all to prevent Electrostatic build up and I was expecting something of the same nature here.)

Anyway, my readers might shake their heads at the above story and think me pretty stupid, but I'll lay dollars to donuts that as this User Guide progresses, you'll get some use out of it. (For example, why is it that when you input your password to access the internet, the Connect button remains grey, so you can't say Connect?  Well, it's because even before you try to connect, the device can tell whether or not you've used the correct password or not! I had thought our Wi-fi password was one thing, but it was actually another, and if the device had allowed me to try to connect but said, "wrong password" I would have known that I was using the wrong password. But instead it wouldn't even let me try to connect - but it would let me sign on as a Guest to my Wi-fi - and then acted as if I was connected, when I tried to go through the rest of the sign in process, but I never really was. I went up to find the correct password, because even when I tried to sign in as Guest (when I went to the Internet and tried to log in, with the device telling me I was logged into wi-fe) it kept telling me wrong password.

Found the right password, but that still wouldn't work. So I decided to go back to the initial set up screen to switch from Guest to my actual Wi Fi account - and it took a helluva long time to find it, as I will describe tomorrow.)

But I found it, input the correct password, and immediately the greyed-out Connect Button ungreyed and let me log in.

So that will be the subject of tomorrow's post in the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 User's Guide.

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