Android Thread

[derspiess]

Hard to believe we didn't have an Android thread in May 2010.  I guess in those days I was content to threadcrap on the Apple thread.

Anywho, I bought the wife a Nook Color for her birthday.  Was on the fence about it but B&N's $50 off coupon on ebay made it an easier decision.  Came out to $212.xx shipped after tax.  It runs on a locked down version of Android 2.1, but after rooting it I got the Android Marketplace and all the other Google apps.  With an 800mhz processor and a 7" 16:9 screen it ends up being a nice cheap Android tablet.

If it were for me I'd wipe the ROM & install Cyanogen on it (or that beta Android 3.0 ROM some dude came up with), but the wife likes the proprietary Nook e-reader interface.  I also installed the Kindle app on it, so she gets the best of both worlds.

The only mistake I made was installing Angry Birds on it, which makes it a lot more difficult to keep out of my 3-year old's hands.

[Ed Anger]

I played with a friend's Kindle Fire today. That motherfucker is FAST. The tablet too.

No review to follow. Bite me.

[derspiess]

I played with a friend's Kindle Fire today. That motherfucker is FAST. The tablet too.

No review to follow. Bite me.

I have yet to get my hands on one.  Was it the web browsing that's fast, or other stuff?  The Engadget review said it was sluggish switching between apps & whatnot, which is kind of surprising given that it has dual-core processors (supposedly it's either the relatively meager 512mb RAM or Amazon's proprietary UI that slows things down).

I would imagine web-browsing is fast as hell, given how the web-browser offloads a lot of the heavy lifting to some supercomputer back at Amazon.

Everyone in my office either has one, has one on order, or wants to order one.  I'd like to have one, but for now I can get by using the wife's rooted Nook Color running Cyanogenmod.

[Ed Anger]

Web browser, netfux and the music was fine. Didn't play with it that much.

[derspiess]

When they first announced the Fire, I told myself I would definitely buy one.  A $200 Android tablet with those specs is almost a no-brainer.

But I would be forced to either play completely within Amazon's walled garden (the device is pretty heavily locked down  for any apps or content that did not originate from Amazon) or root the device & have a decent cheap tablet with limited onboard storage & lacking some key features such as expandable storage, front-facing camera (there's no camera whatsoever but I would probably only ever use a front-facing camera on a tablet), HDMI output, and bluetooth.

It seems that Amazon (smartly) designed the device so that it's sorta crippled if you root it & use it outside their ecosystem.  They want you to stream your audio & video content from Amazon, not get it elsewhere & store it on the device-- so they limited the onboard storage and omitted any option for expandable storage. 

That being said, I do have a large portion of my music collection uploaded to Amazon's cloud service, and their app store selection ain't too bad (the one free paid app each day is pretty awesome).  If I could get myself to pony up the $80 or whatever for Amazon Prime (which would get me access to their streaming video library), paying the additional $200 probably would be a no-brainer.

[Caliga]

I was playing with my droid at the car dealership earlier and thought "it'd be cool to have like a ScummVM for this so I could play classic adventure games on it."

[Darth Wagtaros]

Word.

[Scipio]

Nook Tablet looks promising.

[Caliga]

Word.

https://market.android.com/details?id=org.scummvm.scummvm

[derspiess]

My brother got me one of these monstrosities for Christmas:



The e-ink display is small & has the slowest refresh I've ever seen, and the LCD is a resistive touchscreen, which makes it painful to use if you're accustomed to capacitive.  The company went under this year, so there's no support and it comes with only Android 1.6. 

But it's been a fun device to play around with.  The official beta (which is very stable for a beta) Android 2.2/Froyo is out there to be downloaded, so I installed that.  Also rooted the device & installed Google apps as well as the Amazon app store for the hell of it. 

It surprisingly has a 1.2GHz processor, though I suspect it is underclocked.  Overall build quality is good.  The 7" lcd display is decent-- good for movies, pictures, etc.  But the resistive touchscreen is what holds the device back.  If you don't use the stylus,  you pretty much have to use your fingernail.  Typing anything is painful, stylus or not.  One feature that helps with navigation when I remember it's there is the small trackpad/button.

Have not played around with the e-reader function much-- it choked on a pdf of the device's user manual so that's not a good sign.

Overall it's a fun device to mess around with-- miles away from an iPad or Galaxy tab, though.

[Ed Anger]

Didn't the company that make those go under? I remember when those were on the shopping channels. OMG! TABLET! 300 DOLLARS!

[garbon]

I like when Ed establishes that he reads as much as Tim does.

[Ed Anger]

I like when Ed establishes that he reads as much as Tim does.

I'm only semi conscious.

[Tonitrus]

Blah, my old iPhone 3G is definitely due for replacement, and I was all prepared to get a 4S...but now I flip-flopping on getting a Galaxy II S Skyrocket instead, and trying out Android.

[Liep]

I'm much happier with my SG2 than I was with the iPhone4.