Day 9 – Working up a Sweat on a Windows 8 Tablet
A Windows 8 Tablet for Teaching and Learning - Day 9
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Tonight I am editing my TechTalk4Teachers podcast that I will post tomorrow. Cindy Rich and I do a bi-monthly podcast about teaching and learning with technology. We are now on Episode 142 and I have the raw audio files that we recorded earlier today that I need to edit. Editing involves adding the music at the beginning and ending of the podcast along with the bumper music between segments. The segments need to be stitched together to make it a bit more seamless to make for a better listening experience.
I use a mixer where Cindy and I each have a microphone and the two mics go into the mixer where I can control the volume and then the output goes into a digital audio recorder. We typically record one segment at a time and each segment ends up as a .wav file that is stored on a SD card in the digital audio recorder we use.
Tonight it is time to push my Samsung Ativ tablet to its limits to see what it is really made of. Because the Ativ uses the Clover Trail x86 processor I can use the Audacity program that I normally use to edit the podcast on this Windows 8 tablet. Nice!
First challenge was how to get the .wav audio files off the SD card and into the tablet. No problem as I have a USB SD card reader that all I had to do was take the SD card out of the digital audio recorder, put it into the USB SD card reader and plug it into the full-size USB port on the Ativ tablet. Next I went to the Desktop, clicked on the file manager, created a folder under my documents called tt4t_142, then I copied all the .wav files from the SD card to the tt4t_142 folder. That was easy.
Next up, I launched Audacity from the Desktop and imported the largest audio file into Audacity for editing. The main feature of episode 142 was about the Ativ Super Tablet and it was approximately 30 minutes long before edits. The file size was 384 MB and it took the Ativ tablet 4 minutes and 47 seconds to import this very large audio file. For comparison sake I did the same thing using my Dell XPS 13 laptop that has an i5 processor, 4 GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD hard drive. The XPS 13 imported the same file into Audacity in approximately 45 seconds. Quite a bit of difference and it was the first time I witnessed the Clover Trail processor huffing and puffing.
Another thing that I have noticed about the Clover Trail processor is that this tablet never gets hot. It has a plastic back but I notice no heat coming from the processor like I can feel from some i5/i7 laptops.
Once the large .wav file was imported it was very easy to edit. In fact, I think I like editing the audio file on the tablet better than on my XPS 13. Why? Because I could use the Samsung S Pen Stylus to highlight areas on the timeline to delete. The S Pen gives fantastic control and was very precise in highlighting the edits. Much more precise than using the mouse and clicking and dragging to highlight the area I wanted to edit using the XPS 13 laptop. I noticed no performance issues while editing. Remember this was a 30 minute audio section so it really gave the tablet a real world workout.
I used my high quality headphones plugged into the headphone jack on the tablet so I could listen to what I was editing. It sounded great and I actually think I edited this section faster on the tablet than I could of on the XPS 13 laptop.
So the lesson learned today was that yes, the Clover Trail processor has its limits. Processor intensive activities will take longer on the Ativ tablet. I think the tradeoffs of instant on/off and fast task switching along with long battery life make for an acceptable tradeoff in performance.
If I was doing regular heavy processing activities I would want to take a look at the i5 Windows 8 tablets now on the market – just remember the battery life will be much less.
Discovery of the Day – SlapDASH Podcast app
Since I have been working on Episode 142 of TechTalk4Teachers you may be wondering what podcast app do I use? There are only a few podcast catcher apps in the Windows 8 Store right now and some are free (supported by advertising). The SlapDash podcast app was free and it is the one I use to Subscribe to my TechTalk4Teachers podcast to make sure my RSS feeds are working properly.
If you would like to subscribe to the TechTalk4Teachers podcast you can use the following RSS feed:
Be sure to listen to Episode 142 of TechTalk4Teachers as Cindy and I discuss my newly purchased Samsung Ativ Smart PC Tablet purchase on the show. We take a look at it from an educators perspective.
Keep on Learning,
Dr. Grissom
Dr. Grissom
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
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