Android Tablets

[salan]

Both thoses options sound nice but way over any budget i have!
Need cheap and cheerfull here.
Anyway i don't want somehting big. As I said i need to be able to hold in one hand and use whilst up ladders etc.

[fafster]

The Advent Vega or Archos 101 are the ones to look for at the moment, IMO. The cheaper ones, whilst they may fill a niche, invariably use resistive screens and have a poor build quality. I'd rather save a little longer and get something that will last and be much nicer to use.

[dhicks]

Hang on a minute, though: how well do the bargin-bucket tablets act as thin clients? Even the Toys-R-Us one works with an external keyboard and comes with its own power adaptor - nail it to a wall, plug in a keyboard and away you go?

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

The more I think about it, the more interesting things I can think of that you might be able to do with a dead-cheap Android tablet:

- Thin client.
- Clock radio, like the Chumby.
- Digital photo frame.
- Anywhere you might want a basic touch-screen interface - print-release stations, for a start.

At under £100 they are affordable enough to just get one and play with it. The hardware might be as cheap as possible, and typing on the on-screen keyboard might be impractical, but all of a sudden we have sub-£100 self-contained computers to tinker with.

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

Clock radio, like the Chumby.

Handily, Creative are also bringing out an Android tablet with a built-in radio (£150):

Creative announces Zen Touch2 Android MP3 Player - SlipperyBrick.com

And, from a link on that page, an iPhone table, not tablet:

58-inch Table Connect for iPhone multitouch makes your iPhone giant - SlipperyBrick.com

Which rather makes me think: get an Android device with any kind of video / HDMI / etc out facility, find some way of hooking up a touch-surface device of some kind (modified Wii-based whiteboard?) and get a surface-like interactive table on the cheap.

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David Hicks

[aerospacemango]

LG pad in early 2011, with many “firsts” – Honeycomb, dual-core Tegra 2, 8.9-inch screen « Media News « techshrimp.com

This could well be worth waiting for.....

At least worth a look when it comes out!

[Arcath]

Im waiting for this:

Dell's Atom-powered Inspiron Duo: 10-inch netbook / tablet hybrid with a crazy swivel (update: more video and detailed press photo!) -- Engadget

assuming i can put ubuntu on it and the touchscreen will work with it.

I personally don't see the point of a restrictive OS on a tablet, they are trying to be ultra portable computers so why not run a proper OS?

[dhicks]

all of a sudden we have sub-£100 self-contained computers to tinker with.

So if I go and buy a £90 tablet PC from Toys-R-Us, does anyone know how I'd go about installing a different OS on it? What, exactly, would that involve? Can it simply be booted via a USB stick by plugging in a keyboard and pressing a certain key combination, or does it nessecitate soldering in a new EPROM chip or something? Has anyone had experience of downloading / compiling / installing Android - what do I do, download it to a Linux box and compile a bunch of C to ARM executable code?

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David Hicks

[elsiegee40]

Do/will any of the larger (7inch plus) Android 2.1/2.2 tablets offer 3G connectivity as well as WiFi? (Or the ability to plug in WiFi dongle?)

Not keen to get one tied to a UK network as husband wants one he can use on an Aussie SIM card and switch to a UK one when he's back here.

EDIT What he says he wants is a 7" plus, android 2.1/2 tablet with front facing webcam , wifi and 3G... ideally for £350 or less - the Samsung galaxy is expensive , are the other decent ones likely to be too?

[Arthur]

so why not run a proper OS?

Something other than Windows?

[AyatollahPies]

I fail to see the point of Windows 7 tablets. By default, the tablets are low powered, so why would you want to put a bloated OS, that will require a firewall and Anti-Virus on it?

Sadly, I foresee manufacturers will end up going down this route, just as they did with Netbooks, instead of Linux variants. It will also mean paying having to pay the usual Microsoft tax.

However, that should hopefully mean that we can scrub the OS and put Linux on them.

[dhicks]

But what would you want to put on it?

ChromeOS or similar - I don't want a tablet that lets the user install different apps, I want an OS that is garunteed to be identical accross devices in my organisations (or even The World). That way, it should be updateable via binary diffs, no messing around installing separate updates.

If you want a "tinkering" OS you can't beat Android. I'm forever in the terminal app on my Android phone, or connecting it via USB and using ADB in the Android Developers Kit at the command prompt messing around!

Thanks, handy to know - I'll have a look at that link you provided. Can you replace the Android OS on your phone - could you, say, update to a new version?

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David Hicks

[SimpleSi]

If decent tablets become signifcantly cheaper than say netbooks and cloud applications take off for education (and there is already a few good ones already (Espresso/Education City for instance - and Google Apps for wp/spreadsheets) and you can still access local apps of the Audacity/Video capture type then things could become very nice for primary education

And as Espresso have shown - companies can supply "cloud" apps for your own servers so availablity/preformance would not be an issue

Interesting times

regards
Simon
PS Maybe I'll never have to learn Win7

[dhicks]

Lots of people are busy creating their own ROMs on the Android forums, even to the point of ripping them from other phones, customising them and dropping them onto others.

Right, just trying to get my head around how the typical Android-based phone/tablet/etc boots its OS: there's a ROM chip of some sort inside the device loaded with the OS? Is that chip typically an actual ROM chip (er, EPROM, or am I a couple of decades out-of-date there?) or is it, these days, more typically a soldered-in SD card or something?

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David Hicks

[fafster]

My particular phone - the Orange SF (ZTE Blade) has a Qualcomm 600Mhz CPU, Linux Kernel 2.6.29 and a 512Mb Flash EEPROM. The OS is Android 2.1 and classed as "embedded", but many tweakers have got 2.2 on it now.

A few reports are coming out that if you root the phone and clear out the Orange junk, it will run faster and you'll have a lot more battery.