[Eee Pad Transformer General] knoxploration:
Anybody else noticing lockups with Press Reader's tablet edition? I've found a few bugs, but this seems by far the most severe. It's specific to the tablet edition; never had anything similar with the standard edition that's bundled on the Transformer.

It's happened to me four times now, always while I'm panning around a page that's been zoomed in to 100% by double tapping on the page.

The symptom is that the tablet stops responding completely. Not only is Press Reader locked up, but so is Honeycomb's System Bar -- the Home, Back, Menu, and Apps buttons, and the status section at the right end of the bar all don't respond if tapped. Nor does holding the power button bring up the "Power Off" dialog. If I close the tablet screen on the dock and reopen it, the screen won't come back on.

Honeycomb itself *isn't* locked up, though, just its user interface. If I tap the power button, the tablet goes to sleep, and a second tap wakes it up properly. Also, the most recent time it happened to me, as luck would have it, I had a live radio feed playing on TuneIn Radio, and it kept playing for a couple of minutes after the Honeycomb UI had locked up.

The only way to fix the problem is a cold boot, by holding the power button in for ~10 seconds or so until the screen goes off. On rebooting, Honeycomb and Press Reader work correctly again. It's a bit alarming that whatever the Press Reader bug is can lock up the entire Honeycomb UI, though!

Other bugs I've found:

* When zoomed in 100%, sometimes the graphics in the newspaper appear on the wrong places in the page and/or extremely blurrily. Zooming out and back in again corrects the problem.

* Also when zoomed in 100%, sometimes part or all of the text on the page doesn't re-render, and stays unreadably blurry.

* When downloading new issues of newspapers, the status bar showing the download sometimes stays at zero and/or a thumbnail of the newspaper never appears even though the download has completed, but if I double tap on the incomplete status bar the paper will open, or if I exit and reenter Press Reader the paper's thumbnail will generate and the status bar will vanish.

* I've also had one issue lock up during downloading, and the download wouldn't complete despite working wifi until I rebooted the tablet.

* I also have problems with images seeming to be more compressed on the tablet version, or perhaps not rendering correctly. Comparing the same newspaper, which has a small comics section, the tablet version is blurry enough that I can barely read the text on the comics, while the standard version is much sharper and the same size comic text is very easily readable.

Considering all these together, the tablet version of the app is simply not ready for prime time. Asus didn't upgrade the bundled version of Press Reader on their just-released OTA update, and I'd say that's a damned good thing!

Hopefully NewspaperDirect can fix these issues, and add a "fit page to screen width" viewing mode, which would also require better quality font rendering at lower zoom levels. (Right now, when you zoom out a bit, text rapidly becomes blurry when it should be easily readable, just because the rendering is very poor; this problem applies to both tablet and standard versions, though.)

Obviously the most important bug is the lockup issue, and if anybody else is experiencing it, I'd really like to hear from them...