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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
Xydo is a recommendation startup I first discovered at Hoboken Tech Meetup. Since then I’ve partially trained GetGlue and Hunch to respond to my tastes (not successfully), perused Parse.ly’s recommendation app for filtering feeds, and gauged Google’s own Prediction APIs and Set suggestion tools (pretty good stuff).
Google may have accidentally-on-purpose scooped up data while (war)driving in Germany, and its new option to change the background on its home page is just plain silly, but they did do something right in the last few weeks.