Author Archives: Conor O'Neill

Quick update on Eken T02 Tablet and where is Scribblenauts for Android?

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I asked my 8 y/o daughter on Monday if there was anything she didn’t like about her €88 Tablet after a week of ownership. I assumed she’d gripe about the touch sensitivity of the screen, which I still see as a problem. Nope, she had a single criticism – the battery only lasts a couple of hours on a charge. Otherwise she loves it. She streams TV shows and movies across the home network, browses the web and plays lots of games. Exactly what you want in a tablet.

I’m holding out for a 7″ one with slightly better CPU/GPU and an IPS screen. Should come in around the €110-€130 mark. Maybe that Ainol Elf. I doubt I’ll have to wait long.

As far as she is concerned, the only thing Android lacks is Scribblenauts. Come on 5th Cell and WB Games, get the finger out. Huge youth market for it, all moving away from NDS at the speed of light and not going to iOS.

I just checked out Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Episode 1 on the Eken. However bad I thought Nintendo’s future was looking before, this game confirmed that they are dead unless they bring out an Android gaming device in 2012.

Motorola S10-HD are brilliant Bluetooth running headphones

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The lovely people in Mobile Fun in the UK, home of a bajillion mobile and iPad accessories, contacted me recently. I’m a long-time customer of theirs and I’m a huge fan. Their Dash Genie in-car phone holder is a wonderful thing that just works.

They asked if I wanted to review anything on their site and I cheekily requested a pair of Motorola S10-HD headphones. They shot a pair over to me for free immediately.

I’ve had them for a few weeks and they are just superb. Like a fool, I bought a pair of S9′s on eBay a few years ago. I didn’t suss that the only way they could be so cheap was if they were knock-offs. They fell apart in no time. These real S10-HD’s are in a different league altogether.

The design is unusual in that they basically clamp on to your head. Some people with particularly big noggins report that they are uncomfortable but I found after two uses that they fit perfectly.

The reason I wanted them was for running. I hate the normal in-ear wired headphones that fall out constantly and tie you in knots with the wires as you run. With these, I pair via Bluetooth A2DP to my HTC Sensation strapped to my arm and I listen to all my podcasts and music. It has volume and track selection buttons on one side.

However it also works as a handsfree for the phone. If you are listening to music when an incoming call arrives, it mutes it and you can press a button to accept the call. I tested this paired to my laptop and made a few perfect quality Skype calls with it.

The big test was this morning where I ran a sweaty Bandon 10km and listened to Kermode and Mayo’s movie reviews for an hour. I was chuffed that they worked perfectly, never slipped and did not hurt after an hour. I assume the same will be true when I do the Cork Half Marathon in June. Run Keeper is also able to temporarily mute the podcast and tell me my pace every 1km. Nice.

Not much more to say. They work perfectly. They come with a variety of ear-plug sizes and they are great value. I’ll be using nothing else from now on when running.

Thanks again to the Mobile Fun crew. Still the first site I go to when I want to get something for my phone.

 

Rough n Ready Unboxing and Booting of Raspberry Pi

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Sorry, very busy, so zero production values in this video. Three snippets jammed together but I go from closed delivery packet to fully booted and operational Raspberry Pi with browser running in a few minutes.

Few immediate thoughts:

  1. Shockingly small. You don’t realise just how small until it is in your hand
  2. It just works
  3. The CPU is fine but I think the 256MB RAM is going to be a problem fairly quickly. Most modern Linux apps expect more. Building Fuse from source took a bunch of tries as GCC ran out of memory until I found a low-memory setting
  4. It’s slow but acceptably so
  5. It runs almost cold .Gotta love the ARM architecture.
  6. They should only highlight one Linux distribution on the site and put everyone’s focus on that. Far too early for fragmentation or trying to please everyone.
  7. Should boot into XWindows by default and then show a “Welcome to RPi” screen like Linux Mint.
  8. The efforts on XBMC etc are very exciting
  9. Wireless keyboard and mouse saves you one USB port
  10. 8GB Class 6 MicroSD in an adapter worked fine as the boot device
  11. Full-size SD cards for pennies on sites like 7DayShop
  12. It needs HW-accelerated GUI and decent Java support quickly
  13. I’d love to see someone put together RPi in a case with keyboard and mouse as cheaply as possible. In fact they should make it a competition. I have a $6 keyboard coming from HK at the mo.

Lots more stuff I want to try out at the weekend including making a nice case for it. Expect more posts from me in the coming weeks.

Lunchtime review of Eken T02 7″ Android Tablet for €88

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This quick n dirty video covers most of it, but in summary:

Pros:

  1. It’s €88, in total, including EMS shipping
  2. Android ICS
  3. Capacitive Screen
  4. Full Android Market
  5. HDMI/USB/SDCard
  6. 1080p video
  7. Strong GPU for all games
  8. It’s €88, in total, including EMS shipping
  9. It’s €88, in total, including EMS shipping

Cons:

  1. Screen is only 800×480
  2. Touch can be unresponsive at times
  3. CPU may struggle on heavy-duty games
  4. Some current strangeness with Android Market means apps incorrectly absent
  5. Upgrading OS a bit fiddly
  6. No Bluetooth

I got mine on Pandawill.com. Took approx a week to arrive. Make sure to setup an account first before using PayPal to buy. I didn’t and never got any confirmation email from them that order had even been received.

Did I mention that it’s €88, in total, including EMS shipping?

First two trivial parts of getting App Inventor working on Raspberry Pi done

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I’ve been playing a small bit with the Raspberry Pi VM on VMware to see what’s possible and what isn’t. One thing I am eager to try when it arrives on the week of May 14th (YAY!), is to get App Inventor working on it.

There are three basic user parts to App Inventor. The browser-based Designer, the Java-based Blocks Editor and the Phone Emulator (if you don’t have a phone).

Yesterday I got the first two bits working with about 2 minutes work. All you need to do is install the OpenJDK. SUN Oracle Java is not available yet.

The bit that will need more work is the emulator. I think. Ye see, I grabbed the code for the Linux version of the emulator and followed the simple instructions to build it. Then I saw it was building for i386 and of course the RPi is ARM-based. Damn.

A bit of poking around and I realised we were almost in a recursive loop. I was running ARM Linux in qemu i386 emulator on a Virtual Machine and I was trying to run an ARM emulator inside a another qemu i386 emulator inside that. Yes my head exploded too.

But then sense prevailed and I realised that Android is ARM and RPi is ARM, so do we need an emulator at all, or just an Android image compiled for ARM11 inside some sort of wrapper/container?

As an old Embedded guy I should be all over this but I’ve forgotten more than I ever learned about cross-compiling and building OS images. Anyone have any ideas on where to start? I popped a question on the relevant App Inventor Google Group too.

Of course all of this may be moot if the 256MB of RAM and 700MHz CPU is not enough to support all of this. But it’s worth a try.