HCL Me X1 - A Customers Review

HCL Me X1 is HCL Technologies latest tablet and is one of the cheapest tablets available in India priced at Rs. 10,490. HCL released the X1 on October 14th. This is HCLs third tablet in the Me Series after the AE7-A1 and AM7-A1. I ordered the tablet on 19th through the HCL Store and received it this Tuesday. The entire week I have been toying with the tablet and here are my initial impressions on the Me X1.

This is my first Android tablet (my first Android device in fact) and one of the main reasons I bought the tab was to put up with the Android craze and have my share of fun with the Android platform. So expect to see several posts on the Android platform and the HCL Me X1 on this blog :).

I have been researching Android budget tablets for quite some time and finally decided to get myself the Me X1 (The Lenovo IdeaPad A1 was another option but decided to go with Me X1 after Lenovo priced it at Rs. 15000). Before going deeper into the review let me start by saying that the HCL Me X1 is a good tablet from a price to performance perspective and does a decent job in gaming, music and movies.

The specifications of the HCL Me X1 can be found here. Though HCL hasn't specified the actual Application Processor they are using, it is expected to be the Marvell ARMADA 610.

As evident from the above specifications, the HCL Me X1 doesn't have a SIM card slot and so doesn't support 3G directly. However it does support 3G through a USB dongle. This wasn't much of an issue for me since I was planning to use my Nokia X6 as a WiFi hotspot (haven't tried this yet). The touch responsiveness of the device is good and Gingerbread performs well on the device thanks to the 1 GHz processor.

However the HCL Me X1 does have its shortcomings,

• A major drawback of the Me X1 is that it doesn't have the Android Market on it. Whatever HCL may say, its App Store is no match to the Android Market
• The device works for around 6-8 hours (usage + standby) with a single charge. I wasn't satisfied with this as my Nokia X6 gives me much more than this. However benchmarking a tablet to a phone isn't correct
• The display would have been better if it was a slightly brighter

The biggest weakness of HCL is their delivery service. When most online sites ship within 2-3 days, HCL as a policy takes a minimum of 7 to 10 days to ship the product. However they sent me the devices in 7 days when I pestered them a lot. In fact I would recommend people to buy the device at a local Sangeetha store where you can get it immediately. On the other hand their customer care was good, especially the Live Chat, they answered a lot of questions and followed up on phone as well.

I think the biggest technical improvement opportunities the Me X1 has are the integration of the Android Market and getting out an Ice Cream Sandwich as soon as possible. This should attract more customers towards the product.

Before I wrap up, here are some excellent reviews on the tablet which helped me take a decision on the purchase -

• Arpan Deb's review on the HCL Me X1
• iGyaan's video review on the HCL Me X1
• HCL Me X1 - To Buy or Not To Buy

Update 2011/11/10

After several discussions at arpandeb, we finally concluded that the actual Application Processor being used is the Telechips TCC 88xx. We also found striking similarities between HCL Me X1 and Coby Kyros MID7022.

Named Groups In Regular Expressions - Java 7

One of the new features added in Java 7 was the introduction of named groups in regular expressions through the java.util.regex package. This article covers the various features of named groups in regular expressions and their syntax in Java.

Parts of a Regular Expression can be grouped together by placing them inside round brackets. A major advantage of grouping is that various regex operators can be applied to these groups. Grouping is also useful for back-referencing a match. This allows developers to write regular expressions involving complex repetition patterns more easily.

The value of the captured group can be retrieved directly or be referenced in replacement patterns for changing the format of an input string. Though Java supported Regular Expressions and Grouping through the java.util.regex package from Java 1.4, it was limited to numbered groups.

Here's an example showing how numbered groups can be used in Java. To read more about Grouping and Backreferences, check this out.

Parallel to numbered groups exists named groups. Named groups do not change the underlying concept of grouping and back-referencing but provide more readability to the regular expressions and make back-referencing easier for developers since remembering names is easier than remembering the relative position of a group.

Named groups are already present in languages like Perl, Python and .NET but wasn't available to Java prior to Java 7. Well, better late than never.

The newly added RegEx constructs in Java 7 are as follows -

• (?) defines a named group "name"
• \\k back-references a named group "name"
• ${name} can be used to reference a captured group in a replacement string
• group(String name) returns the value of the captured group

Here's an example showing how named groups can be used in Java 7. To read more about Named Groups, check this out.

However if you are using Java 7, I would strongly recommend using the java.util.regex package but if you are using a Java version older than 7, there are other alternatives available for named groups in Java like Named-RegExp and JRegex. These alternatives were highly recommended by other developers at stack overflow.