I couldn’t resist.
This morning I was in New York City, near Union Square Park, which is known for its excellent farmer’s market.
And temporarily, the Best Buy on the south end of the park is one of the few places you can see and touch Samsung’s stunning Android tablet.
So I took the subway uptown and then made a beeline for the store Continue reading
I finally found one.
With all my relevant RSS feeds already nicely organized in my Google Reader, I naively thought it would be easy enough to view my feeds with an Android app.
Wrong.
For those who have tuned in late, the Archos 7o Internet Tablet doesn’t come loaded with Google Market. It’s a serious inconvenience since I don’t have access now to Google’s free Android apps, although not fatal.
My first idea was to try loading a semi-official Google Reader apk onto my tablet. The one I eventually tracked down in an Android forum predictably failed to register with my online Google credentials.
I turned next to Archo’s own Android app store, AppsLib. After a few false starts, I discovered a winner.Continue reading
Wikipedia
I like my newest gadgedroid, the Archos 7o Internet Tablet. It is usable in a way that the lower cost tablets I purchased earlier, and returned, were not.
With sipdroid now installed and configured to work with my onSIP virtual PBX, I’ve turned airy cloudware into a working, low cost mobile phone solution. The Archos’s email app is completely usable, the browser is browsable, and as I just wrote about, I’ve started introducing my own apps using App Inventor.
But …
Archos tablets do not have Android Market installed. That’s not completely bad news, though certainly a disappointment. To load a free Google app onto the Archos 7o (and presumably the rest of their product line), you’re forced to hunt for .apk files in various forums and Android-dedicated sites, and then install manually.
I’ve begun to experience in the nitty details of Android what many others have already gone through: open Android software does not mean software that will install and work uniformly on all devices.
For example, I tried to get the stand-alone Google Reader app to behave on my Archos. Continue reading
I bricked my Yixin. It didn’t really take that much in the end: merely taping over the on-off button in an attempt to lock a micro SD into a defective slot. Ultimately, I de-springed a not very resilient power switch, rendering this inexpensive Android device powerless, so to speak.
The market is flooded now with under $200 Android tablets with basic capabilities, most of which will not survive till the next holiday season. And that is the point: overseas factories will be busy again next year around this time churning out the latest gadgedroids.
My New Year’s resolution after the jump.Continue reading
On Friday, our friends at Yixin Industry International Group (Shenzhen, China) emailed us with news on a new tablet computer. I guess it won’t be a surprise if I report that their MID YX-7100 product is a 7” iPad clone powered by a Rockchip 2808 processor and running Android 2.1.
I was curious. I took a look at the Yixin website, and this consumer-oriented electronics company has good marketing instincts—better than some well known US laptop makers. I’m impressed with their line of liquid USB flash drives, especially the beer models.
I studied the YX-7100 specs a little more closely, and discovered they’re offering the YX-7100 in white and pink, in addition to basic black. Nice touch!Continue reading
