Email from Slams bridge Club - 2019:
Purchase At Slams Bridge Club I can, on rare occasions, have as many as 18 tables and therefore needed this number of tablets plus some spares. I bought 24 Lenovo TB7 7104F units at 36GBP each, buy one get second 5% off on eBay.
In addition the tablets needed protection. Cases were 6GBP each, again from eBay and again 5% off the second of each pair. It's pointless have new shiny tablets only for them to be damaged in no time. My cases are simple "snap in" and "fold over to close", nothing fancy. Do make sure you get cases that fit the tablets, universal ones may not be suitable, and the hole for the power socket could be in the wrong place.
Total cost for 24 units with cases was a little under 1000GBP.
Problems When first used I had some teething problems caused by laptop settings. Background tasks were tying up computer resources which caused the BridgePals to freeze. Thankfully these problems have been resolved thanks to a good friend of mine. (disk defrag was causing freezes
see this Forum post)
A second problem I encountered was with the router. The one I was using was definitely old and on occasions it stopped working. Identifying the problem was the hard bit. Replacing the router was easy and seems to have done the trick. I now use a TP-Link router (32.99GBP from Amazon).
Operation The users most definitely like the tablets. Previously I used BridgeMate Pro which were second hand when I acquired them (I have a 17 unit set available for 200GBP if anybody wants them).
Between sessions there are two essential tasks that have to be carried out:
* the tablets will need cleaning. They will be covered in fingerprints and worse.
* the tablets will need charging. Mine use 50% of their charge each session probably because the screen is full on all the time. The BridgePal website does point users towards a piece of software called Caffeine which will dim the display after 1 minute of non-use but I haven?t got round to installing it. I have an Anker 10 port charging unit (does 10 at a time) that I bought through Amazon for 26.99GBP that does the job. I haven't timed it, but I`d say it takes about 3 hours to fully charge a set of 10 tablets.
I hope some of this helps.
