High hopes but it hit the mark
594962
While it claims being pre seasoned it isn't. I seasoned it the best I could but the surface inside is more like blacktop instead of smooth. For an iron skillet its a nice size and for that ill give it 2 stars. Sadly for the quality of the product it was disappointing.
1910141
It is not as perfect as expected, but with some efforts and patience you can make it work.
571487
I agree with the most helpful critical review- the flick needs an iron supplement. I mean the elements were all there There was nothing really wrong with it. The production values were solid. The story was interesting and injected some novelty into a supernatural theme we've seen before. It presented the story well visually. But I felt the pull of boredom while watching it. I had to fight it off. That should NOT have been the case with everything I just said. The story line is my cup of tea. It was executed well. What happened? Someone should take another crack at this. Its got serious potential.
532945
I've been waiting, hoping, buying, trying and returning tablets ever since my initial (disappointing) foray with the ipad 2, just hoping that I might find one with the potential to serve as a digital sketchbook- not necessarily something where I could do a finished piece mind you, more just something I could take to the coffee shop and break free of my little home office doing homework. There was only one Android tablet that came close- the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet- but its Ntrig stylus left quite a bit to be desired. As for tablet PC's with Wacom interfaces the lack of pressure sensitivity levels and general bulkiness and need to carry around a charger and bluetooth keyboard (I'm kind of a hotkey glutton when it comes to photoshop)made sketching on good old fashioned paper and scanning it a lot more appealing.

This one finally hit the mark. Thanks, Samsung, for being the first company to really acknowledge the creative community and get together with Wacom.

Is this going to replace a full fledged cintiq or intuos tablet? I don't think so. What it lacks in sensitivity and support for fully featured apps though it more than makes up for in portability.

One aspect that I am a bit disappointed with is the included Photoshop touch app. It seems quite robust as a photo editor for android but it misses the mark in terms of drawing and painting. The brush controls just aren't there- which kind of me wonder why they didn't bundle the imminently more applicable sketchbook pro instead.
301455
better than anticipated.....some clever things happen
1067561
A fairly pedestrian who dun it. It has promise but has a ways to go to be counted among the best
3375033
"The Geographer's Library" has aspirations to that lofty genre, the literary thriller, which is attracting so many hopeful authors and readers of late. For a debut novel, Fasman's efforts come very, very close indeed to success but ultimately a puzzling and cryptic ending left me feeling like I had just dined on that proverbial gourmet Chinese food - you know that old one about eating lots and enjoying it but, when the ending arrives, you're not really satisfied and a few minutes later you're hungry!

The story begins as Paul Tomm, reporter for a small town Connecticut weekly, is assigned to write the obituary for Jaan Puhapaev, an Estonian professor of Baltic history at the local college, who died alone in his rooms. Tomm's questions, initially aimed only at fleshing out the bones on the life of an old man that nobody really knew, quickly began to disclose a much more shadowy past.

Fasman ekes outs the details of Puhapaev's shadowy past and its mystical connection to the shadowy arcane science of alchemy by interweaving a series of fourteen thoroughly entertaining historical vignettes with the main body of the plot. Each story tracks the life line of a different artifact, some now priceless and others barely distinguishable from garage sale junk, all stolen in antiquity from the collection of twelfth century geographer Al-Idris to their resting places in the modern era.

The writing was sharp; the malevolent and stomach-churning plot-line of the thriller was well-paced and compelling; the historical asides were entertaining and informative; the characterization was enjoyable; and the stereotypes - the tweedy college don, small town cops, the laid back weekly newspaper editor, the church-going music teacher and even a Russian mobster - were all spot on and used with wonderful effect. But when the climax arrived and it was time to resolve the thriller and tie the present to the past that magic dissolved in a puff of smoke.

I'm a reader that needs a little more resolution in a novel's ending and this one is anything but - puzzling, cryptic and unresolved with entire futures and relationships left hanging in the balance! I enjoyed the book but I was certainly left with the feeling that it could have been so much more.

Paul Weiss
3161375
The live show is pretty entertaining. I wasn't blown away, but that may have been due to the fact that I had set the expectations way too high.
4453556
Wasnt as awesome as I expected, but I am sure i will use it on occasion.
43134
I had low expectations, but thankfully it exceed them.  I felt like I knew where it was going to go, but I was still intrigued.

Not the family hit of the year. Not cerebral. But it is a saccharin fix for a sweet movie.
2078631
The concept of this game is awesome.  It's an industry first on such a massive scale of a procedural generated world.  It's an indie game made by a company of 15 people.  So that's all great.  I hope a big triple-A studio takes this concept and makes a truly amazing game.  I think $60 was overpriced, and personally I'd rather have custom-made areas that are tailored to the gamer...  but the concept of having the computer generate a massive world is worth me supporting it, so I bought it and don't regret it and hope the industry uses this technology to flesh out some really awesome titles.  However, this isn't one of those truly awesome titles.  It's a good game, I had fun, but each of the 18 Quintilian worlds are similar enough to each other that I'm probably done playing it after two weeks.  There's a huge unexplored world out there, but I'm probably done exploring it.  It was cool, thank god there are so many game breaking glitches that let you cheat the economy, because without those this would have been one hell of a grind to farm and mine everything so often.  The game isn't very challenging, but it is beautiful, and I really enjoyed the space starship battles.
2642836
I was excited to see this vacuum would perform up against our 2-year-old Hoover Windtunnel, which has worked pretty well other than the power cord no longer retracting all the way back into the unit.  I was also excited because I'd heard so much about Dyson vacuums and was expecting something that was going to suck up dirt from almost the other side of the room.  That expectation might have been a bit too high.

I've never owned a Dyson, so I can't compare it directly to that, but I can compare it to the Hoover, and, well, I'm not all that impressed.  I also don't have a pet, but I do have a 9-year-old daughter and a house that gets full of dust and lint and hair seeminlgy overnight.  So having a decent vacuum is definitely important.  When using the main unit with the brush going and the setting all the way down to the lowest, I still had to go over some large area rugs multiple times.  Whereas with the Hoover it seems to be once or at most twice and you're done.  The want and other tools work a little better and are more comparable to the Hoover.  The other issue I ran into was that after just a week or so of usage, and not particularly heavy usage, the suction became quite week.  Yet the canister looked mostly clear.  Somehow all the dirt and hair and such got clogged up at the top of the cannister and I had to manually remove it to get the vacuum working properly again.  With the Hoover, we can go a couple of months before needing to change it, so there might be some design flaw here.  Hopefully it was a fluke and won't happen again, or at least won't happen regularly.

For those who care about how your vacuum looks (I don't particularly), you might like to know that the Eureka is quite colorful, but in a very plastic-y way, which doesn't exude high quality.  That may imply anything about how sturdy or long-lasting this vacuum is.  One thing I found curious is that unlike my Hoover, this one has a metal want, which seems slightly out of place on an otherwise very plastic unit, so while this upgrades the overall look in some ways, it also by contrast might draw a bit of attention towards the rest of the vacuum.

This is certainly a functional vacuum, albeit potentially with some issues.  The price seems reasonable for the quality (as long as the issue around the canister getting clogged proves not to be too regular).  But comparing it to a Dyson I think is a pretty silly thing to do given the reputation of Dysons and the generally mediocre quality of this vacuum.
713116
I really, really wanted to like -- no, to LOVE -- this story. Maybe too much, and that contributed to my overall disappointment in the read. It wasn't an awful book -- the writing was good, the characters well-drawn, the setting interesting and believable, the world-building worked for me. I enjoyed the idea of biocyph and how the teks worked, and the relationship that built between the characters were very well-done, but... I think that my expectations for the story were too high. Partially because I'd heard that the story was so good, but partially because of Creasy's development itself. There's a lot of time and effort put into the secrets of Scarabaeus and I'm not going to include spoilers, but suffice it to say that I found the ultimate unraveling of the secrets to be something of a frizzle rather than a bang. Certainly, the story twisted nicely with the revelations, and everything fit as it continued, but I'd expected something more than what everything turned out to be, and that left me feeling let down. Also, the book really does end on a cliffhanger of sorts -- the big questions of the book are answered, but there's a lot left that has to be explored. I do have the second book, Children of Scarabaeus, and I will probably read it, but I won't go into it expecting anything dazzling or brilliant, maybe just a decent space-set story.
641269
I have been eager to acquire the first tablet for my household - I have many different applications for tablets in mind to fit my family's digital lifestyle, at the top of which is long car rides where I don't want to waste precious car space with DVD cases, multiple devices (game consoles, portable players, laptops).  So with an eager mind and a lot of research, I took the plunge on the Transformer expecting to experience the same thrill as I had when I first bought my EVO 4G at launch last year.

What I found in practice is the tablet experience on Android is not yet compelling enough to look past some of the flaws of the Transformer.  My unit suffered from pretty strong light bleeding, to the point where the lower half of the screen had a permanently yellowish tint to it.  Also, the touchscreen was not entirely responsive to touch, particularly when using any browser, stock or otherwise.

The unit itself was heavily borrowed from the Google reference architecture, so I don't really have any negatives to speak of regarding style - Asus did a good job with the look and feel of the Transformer.  It's an attractive device and it's easy to hold and the weight isn't a problem as I found it to be on the Acer Iconia.

Like others have also pointed out, they aren't kidding about how short the charging cable is.  I don't know what Asus was thinking shipping the Transformer with a charge cable that's no more than 2' long.  I don't know how many times I yanked the charger out of the wall reaching for the tablet while it was sitting next to the bed.

The devil for me is in the details - the lack of apps, the lack of mature and broad support for video codecs, and the knowledge that ICS and quad core devices are just around the corner will keep me from rushing to replace my Transformer, but I look forward to the future and getting back in.

Just a hunch, but I'd wager many of the positive reviews came from folks who bought the $399 16 GB version.  At that price point, some of the hardware and OS [maturity] issues become more forgivable, but at $499 for the 32 GB version you start to have other options which become more attractive - especially now that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 launched (yes, it's 16 GB, but there are other benefits) and the Toshiba tablet launched as well.
4005345
I have been anticipating this product for about a year, so I was probably set up for the mild disappointment I experienced when it arrived.  The early user review I read was almost certainly a plant since it pretty much was a rewording of the promotional materials preceding the product's release.  For sure, the pen is pretty "cool" and quite a conversation piece, but there are a few drawbacks that are evident to me.

First, you have to hunt around for the electronic documentation since there are no printed instructions at all.  That's not impossible, but somewhat annoying, especially when the documentation you do find is not all that clear.  With a little time it can all be figured out, but it's certainly not plug and play out of the box.  That brings us to the second issue, actually using it.

Very often the "recorder" doesn't start when the pen starts to move, so the resulting image (words or hand drawn graphics) has a lot of blank or missing parts.  Slowing down a great deal helps a little, but still there are quite a few gaps.  And slowing down to check the little light while taking notes during a presentation defeats the purpose of the thing anyway.

Finally, the resulting proprietary file which can only be exported through the cumbersome pdf format rather than the easily and widely used jpg format is very inconvenient.  And the character recognition is actually sort of humorous in its inaccuracies.  I suppose if I took the time to carefully print each number and letter the accuracy would improve, but again, that's not notetaking as it is usually performed.

I guess it's amazing that the thing works at all, but it's still just a little disappointing.  I'll hang on to it because it's fun to have and show people, but it's probably easier just to scan the notes.
459089
Not exctly a surprise. Nevertheless a welcomed dvelopment.
4812564
The recommended dose was not strong enough for me. I increased the dose and achieved really impressive results.