Tag Archives: android

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.

Unofficial Mario Kart 64 on Android and an $89 Tablet

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Two completely separate stories joined together nicely this morning.

First was the news that Mario Kart 64 now runs on Android. I initially thought [a] it’s an official port and [b] therefore it’s an April fool. But I installed and ran it perfectly on a HTC Sensation running ICS.

Then I got an email from MP4 Nation in Hong Kong offering their Herotab C8 Android Tablet for $89. Yes, that’s €66 for a 7″ multi-touch capacitive screen tablet with 512MB RAM, 4GB storage, Wifi, HDMI, USB, USB OTG, microSD, 1.2GHz CPU and (sadly) Android 2.3.

Now this tablet is entirely generic and they even warn that it will probably have cosmetic nicks and marks on the body but it’s €66!

My daughter was looking at the Nintendo 3DS in the Argos catalogue yesterday and it was €182. As for the PS Vita pricing, are they all on crystal meth in Sony? Not a hope.

Which do you think your kids are going to go for? An overpriced clunky web-clueless 20th century device with games that cost upwards of €44 a pop. Or a web-enabled handheld computer with hundreds of thousands of apps and games where most cost less than €5?

The perfect example of this is Scribblenauts which is €21 on DS and 79c on iPad. None of our kids play it on DS any more, as the 10″ screen on the iPad blows it away for playability. Yeah yeah I know Scribblenauts isn’t on Android yet. But you get the point.

I know they won’t do it, as they (like Apple), make a profit on their hardware, but at some point Nintendo is going to have to bite the bullet. The Sony Experia Play is the sort of thing they should be looking at but for a younger audience and with really great gaming controls.

It’s time for the Nintendo Andro-DS. It would offer the absolute best playability for DS games. They might go the route of locking the games so that they only play on their Android device and they also give owners access to the full standard Android market. But if they were really brave they would make the games available on all Android devices for €4.99 each. They should still make an Andro-DS as it would be the best way of playing the games.

Scribblenauts has sold 1m units on iPad. Mario Kart Andro-DS would sell 20m units easy.

Back to that el-cheapo tablet. Android 2.3 is horrible on tablets so it really needs to have ICS before I’d consider it, no matter how cheap. There are some community ROMs out there but they all look very early-stage. If I could be sure ICS was coming, it is a no-brainer at that price. Still I’m very tempted to take a flutter as it’s a 1-day deal only.

No I don’t want to install your stupid hamstrung iPad App, I want your web-site

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I saw a tweet along those lines the other day (sorry can’t remember who) and it really struck a chord. These “please install our App” pop-ups are infuriating in general on both Android and iOS. Every single vbulletin site I have gone to recently has done it. Why the hell would I want a separate App for every damned site I visit?

But yesterday was the new nadir with Dropbox. Not only do you get the pop-up, they won’t let you visit information/download pages for any other platform on the iPad, they just auto-re-direct you to the iPad page!!

For fucks sake Dropbox, I wanted to read what was involved in installing on a Linux server. Do I really need to use a desktop to read that page?

This finally revealed a very good reason for jailbreaking your iPad – you get a User-Agent Switcher and can pretend you are running Firefox on the Desktop. Also handy for those stupid sites who want to force a dumbed-down mobile web-site on you.

Piss-poor reduced functionality Apps are the scourge of iOS and Android. Last weekend I ended up uninstalling the iPad Facebook App and now use the website in Safari just so I can have a goddammed Share button.

Cyanogenmod – The Community Android Firmware – Now 1 million users!

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As a longtime Cyanogenmod user even I’m a bit shocked by this number.

 

In case you aren’t aware of it, Cyanogenmod is a community built version of Android AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Every time Google releases a new version of Android, they release the source code shortly afterwards so that anyone can build a phone or phone software using it. There are hundreds if not thousands of community projects which take this code and port it in different ways to all the different handsets.

Cyanogenmod is the best known and usually the best. You get lots of great extra features, usually a speed improvement and most importantly, it excludes all those HTC/Samsung/Motorola bloatware UIs that those manufacturers insist on adding to their phones.

Cyanogenmod is also fantastic for getting the latest version of Android on to old unsupported phones. I’ve even run Gingerbread 2.3 on my old HTC G1 which was the first ever Android phone.

But I’ve always seen Cyanogen as a niche geek thing that would never have big numbers. I assumed the hassle of rooting your phone so you can install it was too much for most people. But 1m users is stunning. I could see this number going through the roof if a bunch of no-name Chinese phone makers use it and release $50 no-contract Android phones this year.

Well done to Steve Kondik and all of the Cyanogenmod teams out there. We’re all eagerly looking forward to CM9 which is the Cyanogenmod version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Condom Train Returns

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After some more reading on the lack of Paid Apps in Ireland, it appears that all the blame may not be on Google after all. From what I can see, Mobile Operators in each country have to sign up to the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) to get “access” to the Android Market.

How much do you bet that none of the Irish operators have done so?

We know that Three UK SIMs work in Vodafone Ireland HTC Desires. I’m pretty confident that they’ll work in all other Irish Android handsets since the operators are just box-shifting rather than getting custom versions done.

Those Three SIMs are free.

In the 1970s, there were a series of famous train journeys to the North where motivated modern people went to buy tons of condoms and distribute them down South where they were banned by the local yokels.

So let’s organise a follow-up.

Swarms of desperate Android owners and their friends grabbing fistfuls of free 3UK SIMs in Belfast and Newry, bringing them back over the border and distributing them to the hungry-for-apps hordes?

You know it makes sense.

“What do we want?” “Paid Apps” “When do we want them?” “Now!”

The revolution is upon us.

 

Dear Vodafone/Meteor/O2, please give Google a hard slap from Irish Android Owners

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The first Google Android phone went on sale in Ireland at the start of November 2009. It is now May 2010. And we still don’t have Paid Apps in Ireland. All of the networks are losing Android phone sales because of this and all of those people who have Android phone are pissed off and wishing they’d bought bloody iPhones.

What the hell is the hold up Google?

As I have posted here many times, I can stick a PAYG Three UK SIM in my phone when in Ireland and see all of the paid apps. I can then buy them in Google Checkout using my Irish Credit Card.

There is even an app out there to trick the phones into thinking there are not in Ireland to achieve the same thing.

So the problem is not technical.

Where is the problem? Taxation? Surely you have that sorted, given the billions you run through the Irish operations here?

Not setup to get your 30% cut? 30% of SFA is still SFA. The rev-share you’ll get in Ireland on App sales would barely cover petty cash for paper-clips in Mountain View.

I would guess that minimal revenue is the reason until you look at the list of enabled countries. It’s tiny. 

  • Australia
  • Austria
  • Canada
  • France
  • Germany
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Netherlands
  • New Zealand
  • Spain
  • Switzerland
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

And I don’t think I have seen that change in more than 6 months.

Wait a second. New Zealand? Are you kidding me?

Sort this.

Now.

 

Huge mistake by Google with Earth on Android

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Today Google released Google Earth on Android and it sounds impressive. But they have made a huge error of judgement in the release. It only runs on one phone, the Google Nexus One. 

I have just tried it on a G1 with OpenEclair (a community version of Android 2.1 which runs on the Nexus One). It installs but refuses to run. The only app of 30+ that I have tried which has failed to do so.

Quite apart from compounding the negative message they are sending to other Android phone vendors with the Nexus One launch itself, it looks like they are repeating all the mistakes of J2ME.

Android was supposed to be the realisation of the “write once, run anywhere” promise made by Sun for Java in 1995. Fragmentation of J2ME on mobile turned it into an unmanageable mess with software vendors having to generate potentially hundreds of variations of their apps for different phones. The alternative was to create lowest-common-denominator apps that worked everywhere but were totally hamstrung and ugly as hell.

Now here we are 16 months after the first Android phone and it is happening all over again. Millions of G1, Hero, Galaxy and other Android devices were sold in 2009. All of them run Android v1.x software. None of them can run Earth. None of them can run the mobile browser version of Buzz.

Google will tell you that it’s the handset vendors job to keep the firmware up to date. I’m a punter, I remember what it’s like to wait for the Vodafone branded version of my Nokia N70 software, months after Nokia released it. It was annoying as hell with the operators then, it is just as annoying with handset vendors now. 

If I buy an iPhone, my apps just work. Ok, they may not have any smut in them, but they work. If I buy a DVD, it works. If I buy almost any Windows application, it will run on W2K, XP, Vista and Win7. That’s OSes spread over an 12 year period. 

If I install Google Earth on a Motorola Droid I bought in December, it won’t run.

Of course OSes have to improve and evolve but Android has both backwards and forwards compatibility breakage. Apps written for v1.5 may not run on v2.0 and apps written for v2.1 won’t run on v1.5.

This is a really really serious problem. Fix it Google or you will hit a brick wall in 6 months time when there are 40 handsets running 400 different firmwares and app developers and punters head back to the stable predictable iPhone platform.

I know I have re-considered my next Android device. Whilst Google might be happy that I would now default to the Nexus One since I know it will get the most support (as the G1 did before it), it does not bode well for other manufacturers supporting Android. With Samsung launching Bada and Sony Ericsson trying to support Android, WiMo and Symbian, it’ll be a brave person who buys their Android phones.