Android Tablets

[stevenlong1985]

Archos 70 Internet Tablet now shipping for $279 with 8GB storage, Android 2.2 -- Engadget

I want this one!

[Guest salan]

This may seem like going off at a tangent but i have been looking at something like these for things like connecting directly to switches (when I need to reprogram them). So all I need is a terminal and a serial port.

A usb to serial adaptor (with driver would do). Before someone says 'use a laptop' some switches are in such obscure postitions, that what ever you use, you have to hold in you hands whils holding on to the cab and balancing on the top of ladders etc!

So at first I was after a cheap tablet laptop (something like in Stargate Atlantis BTW any one know what make/model they were?), but the idea of a android 7 inch/10 inch seems good.

Any thoughts?

A specific use that shouldnt be hard to do surely?

Alan

[Arthur]

A usb to serial adaptor (with driver would do).

Would this be doable with an Android tablet? If not, perhaps a HP Slate 500 would be a better choice since it runs Windows 7 (although it's not exactly cheap).

[dhicks]

Would this be doable with an Android tablet? If not, perhaps a HP Slate 500 would be a better choice since it runs Windows 7

 

I was thinking of the Advent (PC World) Vega, running Android, for £250. But then I remembered the new RM Slate, which at £400 (well, nearer £500 with VAT and delivery, i.e. double the price) might be an idea - runs Windows 7, has a bunch of USB slots, basically looks like a desktop PC squished into a tablet case. If it runs Windows 7 then I figure it should also boot any other OS you wanted.

 

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

Ooh, another tablet:

 

Creative ZiiO tablet review: first look | PC Pro blog

 

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David Hicks

[Guest 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?

Edited November 4, 2010 by Arcath

[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?

Edited November 4, 2010 by elsiegee40

[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.

[dhicks]

A usb to serial adaptor (with driver would do).

 

It turns out the iPad actually has a serial port built in, you just need (to build) an adaptor. Sorry, can't get to the URL at the moment, but it was on Slashdot a couple of days ago.

 

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

The only thing I've not yet done is made the jump to a new custom ROM, but I'll probably tackle this at the weekend to get my apps onto the SD card.

 

Can the ROM on the Toys-R-Us / Elonex / Zenithink be changed too? I found somewhere listing the internal storage capacity as "2GB Flash NAND Solid State Storage Device" - would that be the EEPROM chip? Do you still need a special EEPROM writing device for those?

 

Edit: also, thought of a couple more uses for a very cheap tablet - graphical calculator and classroom response device. I can't remember exactly how much my old Texas Instruments graphical calculator cost back in sixth form, but even the cheapest (£85?) tablet should have several orders of magnitude more computing power / storage available.

 

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David Hicks

Edited November 5, 2010 by dhicks

[Arthur]

I fail to see the point of Windows 7 tablets.

Not only that, but Windows 7 has numerous usability issues on touch screen devices. Perhaps manufacturers should use the Windows Phone 7 OS instead if they have to use Windows?

 

The problem with touch on Windows 7 [...] is that it reads round finger presses as pinpoint cursor clicks. When your finger touches an area, Windows reads it as a tiny cursor click. That unavoidably leads to accuracy problems

 

By contrast, iOS, Android, webOS, and every other touch-optimized OS reads finger presses as circular areas, more comparable to your actual fingertip surface. That's why even my fat fingers can manipulate things on those tiny screens. When my finger engulfs a button, it registers as me pressing that button, just like a physical button. By contrast, on a Windows touchscreen PC, that same situation could register the touch outside the button. Hence, making buttons bigger than fingertips could address this symptom, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem. Furthermore, you can’t 'big button' the Internet." (Source)

 

I've already written that Windows Touch was a disappointment, so here are some examples:

 

• Touching user interface elements was imprecise and, at times, very difficult.
  
• It took me a while to work out how to right-click. Eventually, I got there, but it shouldn’t need me to Google basic functionality like this!
  
• The onscreen keyboard is obtrusive – it doesn’t seem to appear/disappear when required and, although it can float, or be docked, it seemed to always be in the way until I increased the screen resolution, after which the user interface elements are too small. It couldn’t keep up with my typing either – I’m no touch typist, but Windows made a right mess (as can be seen at the head of this post), whereas I can type reasonably well on my iPad’s soft keyboard.
  
• At the extreme edges (typically the right) of the screen, I found I couldn’t touch pixels (e.g. a scroll bar) because the screen bevel was preventing physical access and so my fingers were not registered.
  
• UAC prompts that invoke a secure desktop required a physical keyboard as the software keyboard was unavailable!
  

(Source)

Edited November 6, 2010 by Arthur

[Arthur]

Right, just trying to get my head around how the typical Android-based phone/tablet/etc boots its OS

The diagrams on this webpage explain the process really well...

 

http://www.androidenea.com/2009/06/android-boot-process-from-power-on.html

 

Also, before you can use a custom Android ROM, you usually have to unlock the devices bootloader...

 

Why Is The Bootloader Locked?

A bootloader is usually locked on an Android device because although it's an open source OS, the manufacturers still want you to stick to their Android OS version specifically designed for the device. In order to apply this concept, manufacturers lock the bootloader. With a locked bootloader on Android devices, it is virtually impossible to flash a Custom ROM and forced attempts void warranty as well as usually end up in bricks. Therefore, the first step is to always unlock the bootloader.

 

How To Unlock Bootloader On Android Devices?

The explanation to this question is really simple. If you want root, you'd be wanting to flash Custom ROM post-root, and if you want to install a Custom ROM, you'd need to have your stock bootloader unlocked. In simple terms Unlocking the bootloader allows you to install custom Firmware on your Android phone. Although we believe that unlocking a bootloader is awesome, but we think it's our duty to inform that after unlocking your phone's bootloader, your device's warrant goes void there and then. This is not only applicable for Android devices, but stands true and valid for iDevices running variants of iOS as well. Also note that unlocking the bootloader on your phone also completely wipes (formats) your Android phone and you will be left with zero applications/contacts/multimedia content etc. (Source)

 

Rooting

To protect the Android operating system from corruption, it is read-only. In addition the NAND is locked so that new images cannot easily be flashed. To update Android you must get 'root' access to the operating system. root is the user name or account that by default has access to all commands and files on every Linux or other Unix-like operating system such as Android. It is also referred to as the root account, root user and the superuser. Rooting on an Android phone has come to mean the process of installing an alternative recovery image that also provides root user privileges under some circumstances and the ability to unlock the NAND and allow flashing. Rooting only replaces the recovery image, it does not affect the bootloader, the Radio ROM, the Android ROM or any apps. If you root a stock HTC Android phone it will still behave just the same.

 

Bootloader

The bootloader is a small piece of code that is used to load an operating system. The bootloader in HTC Android seems to be composed of two portions named Fastboot and Hboot. Hboot has a few manually accessible features, the one we are most interested in is the ability to load a recovery image.

 

Android ROM (or the ROM)

The Android ROM is the Android operating system. This is the User interface (Sense UI in HTC phones) and the file system for maintaining contacts etc. It is composed of a Linux kernel and various add-ons to achieve specific functionality.

 

NAND

There are two main types of Flash memory NAND and NOR. This is the memory used to permanently store the ROM images inside the phone. Most consumer devices use NAND memory.

 

Recovery image

In HTC Android phones, the recovery image is a piece of software that can load a ROM image from the SD Card and Flash it into the internal ROM. The recovery image is accessed from Hboot. (Source)

[dhicks]

The diagrams on this webpage explain the process really well...

 

Indeed - thankyou. Hmm, interesting. Lots of stuff on that page about how trying to update firmware can mangle your Android device - I know I'm going to spend £100 on one of these and instantly void the warrenty, but I'd like to try and check if it is actually updateable. If the Toys-R-Us device is actually the Elonex ePad, which is actually the Zenithink ZT-180, then this page would seem to contain some useful instructions:

 

Zenithink ZT-180 ipad device ROM development - xda-developers

 

Also, while I was Googling I found this article by Jack Schofield:

 

Who makes the Next tablet, or your next tablet? | ZDNet UK

 

Where he says:

 

At least a couple of dozen Chinese manufacturers are churning out tablet computers, and you can buy them in quantities as low as 10.

 

Which is interesting - could schools just cut out the middleman and start shipping devices straight from the factory in China?

 

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David Hicks