Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet • Hacker News Board

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#91

Post by angusgr » Tue, Nov 23, 2010, 10:19 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #90

angusgr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was their test run, evidence seems to be that they've gotten back out of the make-your-own hardware game.

The Nexus One was made by HTC, basically a rebadge of their Desire handset. The Nexus S that Google have been showing off but not yer announced is basically the Samsung Galaxy S. So either Google was never in that game, or they're still in it depending on definitions.

I see! When Google stopped selling the Nexus One to end users there was speculation that they were done branding handsets. Guess it was just speculation.

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#92

Post by angusgr » Tue, Nov 23, 2010, 11:11 PM UTC

pronoiac wrote: post #81

angusgr wrote: post #67

These devices really are cheap and nasty. I have an Eken M001 and an M003, which are the same WM8505 chipset and (AFAIK) the exact same Android port. However, if you're stuck with one then it's worth loading one of the alternative firmwares from http://www.slatedroid.com/ on it. People have done quite a lot with the closed source Android port to make it more usable. They also make for good tinkering/reverse-engineeri…

So alternate firmware really doesn't help that much? The hardware is too rough to salvage?

It's really hard to make convincing generalisations about this.

A lot of people seem to be happy with their cheapie tablets as a e-readers, tinker boxes, light web browsers, portable video players, etc.

Noone who really wants an iPad equivalent is going to be happy with one, though. Different leagues.

Like all technology, it comes down to what you want to do with it. I'm not a very good measure of that, because I originally bought an M001 to hack on (I originally wanted to use mine as a cheap robotics controller, however it developed a hardware fault that makes it difficult to power on so it's not really a good candidate any more.)

Re: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

#93

Post by Dbug » Tue, Nov 23, 2010, 11:39 PM UTC

tibbon wrote: post #5

nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #2

I pity all the uninformed consumers who buy this, or even worse, people who receive this as a gift from those uninformed consumers...

I almost did run down to Walgreens to buy one when I heard about it. I thought, "Android is open source, it should be fun to hack right? How bad can it be?" It seems the answer is really really bad. Much of it reminds me of my original Phillips Windows CE 1.0 device I had. Glad I didn't go and buy one. Its bad when a device that was never supposed to run Android (the iPhone) can be hacked to run it better than a devi…

'I almost did run down to Walgreens to buy one when I heard about it. I thought, "Android is open source, it should be fun to hack right? How bad can it be?" It seems the answer is really really bad.'

If Android using the Apache license means that vendors only have to provide the (Google) source they started from and not for the final result, you basically can't hack what you got, but have to deal with code that was never customized for the device you've got. In effect the source was open for the vendor, but it isn't for you. So much for fixing bugs in what you get...