The Android thread

I've have not been very active in the phone area for the last few moth (As you may have noticed) since my hero really isn't anything special anymore. (I can't even play angry birds!? :O ).
But now it's time for a new phone since all the dual core phones are coming now! (yay! :D)

At the moment it looks like I'm going to find the big wallet and buy the Samsung Galaxy S2. The LG Optimus is just waaay too iPhone wannabe and it really isn't working that well... + it doesn't look like the will be any great HTC phones for a while :(
That Samsung is simply too gorgeous!

 
That Galaxy S II looks really good, my Hero is too getting long in the tooth and I'm having a hard time waiting untill those new dual core phones come out :p But I guess it'll be worth it.
 
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I have about a year left to wait with my Hero, but outside of gaming it's perfectly adequate. Actually web browsing leaves a bit to be desired....
 
Sure am typing this on my newly purchased nook color. Unforunately I just tried to root it and accidentally destroyed my only extra microsd card.... fomatted it and now it only reads as 39mb. Suggestions? I plan to reeturnd the nook in 12 days, given a price drop is probably coming soon.
 
Sorry for double post. Figure it out. Rooting nook now.
 
i somehow find myself drooling over the viewsonic viewpad 10s... seems to be quite nice, considering the price (~350euros here). only downside so far is no honeycomb (but hopefully they keep their promise and update as soon as possible)... mhmm... any thoughts? (not much info out there, seems to be pretty young)
 
I'm reading mixed views on the Viewsonic's display... seems like the main drawback, other than shit stock software.
 
Sure am typing this on my newly purchased nook color. Unforunately I just tried to root it and accidentally destroyed my only extra microsd card.... fomatted it and now it only reads as 39mb. Suggestions? I plan to reeturnd the nook in 12 days, given a price drop is probably coming soon.

You think they are going to drop the price again soon? I think B&N lowered it in anticipation of the iPad 2 announcement last week, but I think they kind of know they get a hot item on their hands with the Nook color. Then again I read somewhere they only sold a few thousand through that $199 promo code thing, so maybe it's not really a hot item at all.

Anyway, how do you like it other than the price? Is the bezel really as thick as it looks? I really like the Galaxy tab in my hands but the Nook color is a bit wider and quite a bit taller it seems.
 
I have a Nook Color and rooting it was SUPER easy! After I rooted it, I have experienced a few wonky little glitches, but overall it is very nice. Battery life is decent and I think that it is a very nice size. The only real issue I have is that youtube stuff won't work, but I think I screwed that up all on my own. I don't use it for youtube that often, so I am not working very hard to fix it, and other than that I love it!

Jake, how did you screw up your SD card that bad? There has to be a way to fix it... or just borrow one from someone long enough to get the rooting done, it literally took me 15 minutes from download to completion using Nooter.
 
I use YouTube quite a bit on my phone, the new app is actually quite good.

Is there Flash support in some ROMs at least for m.youtube.com?
 
I'm reading mixed views on the Viewsonic's display... seems like the main drawback, other than shit stock software.

yeah i read the viewing angels aren't too great, but i'm not really bothered... i don't plan on "sharing" my display with other people too much and it shouldn't be too big of a problem on my own. also: shit software should be taken care of either by a hopefully early honeycomb update or some sort of custom ROM which can't be too hard to find (at some time in the future that is).
 
Well I just picked up a Nook color... all I can say so far is I really like the hardware. I am totally feeling the 7-inch.
 
TetherGPS brings GPS navigation to the Nook.

EDIT: You know, I'm beginning to rethink my stance on the Nook not working for me in the car. If I can come up with a simple, clean way of mounting and unmounting it right in front of the stereo, I can have all the advantages while still being able to remove it to prevent theft and allow use elsewhere.

No, I have to stop thinking like this, I'm already is a bit of water over recent expenditures.
 
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Well I just picked up a Nook color... all I can say so far is I really like the hardware. I am totally feeling the 7-inch.

Totally with you. Its a great little device. We shall see how it is when i get home d install the 1.1ghz overclock kernel. Right now its a bit slow for my taste. The size is perfect. In portrait thumb typing is really comfortable and its holdable with one hand for reading.
 
Well, Electric-Mayhem seems pretty pleased with his 10" Viewsonic. Though given he says the software he put on it is rather buggy I don't know...

Personally it's not that I'm bent on getting a 7" tablet - I see advantages to both sizes, so given that the Nook color is a decently priced option that's on sale right now that's why I'm considering a 7" tablet.

Sorry guys, I haven't been online much today and forgot to look to see how much response there was here. Didn't realize all the questions.


Build quality wise, I'm very impressed with the Gtablet. The front is a nice glass, scratch resistant screen, and the back feels like a nice solid metal one, probably aluminum but I can't tell for sure. Its powdercoated or anodized black though, and stays clean fairly well. The switches and such have nice feel to them, and the plugs are nice and tight. Absolutely no complaints from a build quality standpoint. Maybe not the most innovative design, but its very usable.

Usability wise, its a tiny bit heavy, but not so much that I can't hold it with one hand and use the other to navigate. It is missing a few features that would be nice, such as the home, back and menu buttons (all capacitive) being backlit. No vibration, so no haptic stuff. It does have an optional Dock, which lets you plug HDMI, additional USB, and a Network port in. It already has a slot in the side that has space for a Micro SD card, and a full size USB port, along with the mini-USB port to connect it to computer. Bluetooth and Wifi both work fine, though the range on the Wifi doesn't seem to be as good as a laptop.

Its hard to say on performance. The software that comes with it out of the box is ATROCIOUS, so if you can't deal with installing a ROM, don't buy this tablet. Viewsonic did release an OTA update that made it slightly better, but it still sucked. Very limited market access, still slow and cumbersome, and just not what it should be.

That said, there are two very stable ROMS for this tablet, both of which are based off the Tap n' Touch that the Tablet came with. One is called Vegan, and the Other TnT Lite. They both cut the fat away, and then add functionality to it so its much much more usable. The Vegan guy is in beta testing of a Gingerbread based ROM now, and I've heard he is on the CyanogenMod team for the Gtablet too now.

CyanogenMod was stable, but had a few critical bugs that rendered it useless for me until they figure them out. Most notably, you couldn't access the internal SD card, either via ES File Manager or similar, or via USB. Thats a problem for a number of reasons, but most notably it restricts being able to flash other roms since you can't transfer the zip files onto the root of the SD card. I actually had to completely wipe the whole tablet and then figure out how to get NVFlash to work to get it back to stock and start all over. Not a fun process the first time, since its REALLY hard to find the USB flash recovery drivers on the Nvidia site (you essentially have to download the ones for the development kits). I'm keeping an eye on CM, but until its got some of the bugs ironed out I'm staying away.

I got that all figured out, and am running the Vegan-Tab stock tweak ROM now. Its quite stable, but still not perfect. The machine and OS run fine, but its clear that a lot of stuff isn't made for a Tablet yet. Its more an issue with other Apps then it is with the on board software. I expect that to change in the next year or so, so no real regrets. Getting full Android Market takes a few steps, but its not hard and once I figured it out I got all the apps that I was really wanting and needing for this thing to do what I want.

The reason I jumped on this so fast is I am headed to Moab in a couple weeks, and want to use it for offroad GPS navigation and route finding. Oruxmaps allows you to download a number of different styles of map, which you can then apply GPS waypoint "tracks" to to know where the trails go. It sucks that the Gtablet doesn't have onboard GPS, but I think it could actually work a bit better having a external one since its more efficient battery wise, and they tend to have better features. I have my eye on one that has some nice features but is reasonably priced.

I'll keep everyone informed of how things go with it. So far, I'm loving it and have no regrets. This is especially true since its only going to get better from here on out with it. I don't see technology overtaking this tablet for quite a while, since its fairly cutting edge with the Tegra 2's.
 
Finally rocking 2.2 and the de-Blurred Fission ROM on new DROID2 G. Just hope the battery life lasts though.

Sent from my DROID2 GLOBAL
 
After a few days of use I've discovered: Android 2.1 and 2.2 suck ass for tablets, and I mostly use the Nook Color for reading.

As such, I'm going to return it and order a Wi-Fi Kindle.
 
Aren't there honeycomb builds on the way for the nook?
 
The only Honeycomb for the Nook color is just a port of the Honeycomb emulator. If you go with the internal storage version it works alright, but it's still pretty buggy and you don't get any of the new Google tablet-optimized apps so it's pointless.

I'm actually really coming around to the Nook color, even with Android 2.2 it's okay. The thing is it's like WinMo, I had to spend a few hours to make it nice... I had to find a ROM that doesn't exist on XDA because the guy who makes it quit posting there, I spent half an hour fine tuning the LCD density so everything lined up right, I had to install the Gingerbread keyboard, I had to find a dark theme to go with the keyboard, the default boot animation sucksedso had to change that, ROM had lots of junk apps I had to uninstall...

I really hated this thing for the first day I had it, but with this mysterious underground Froyo ROM it's pretty damn nice.
 
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So, my dad had i HTC Desire but today he dicided to go to the dark site! He could get an iPohne 4 for almost no money so he bought that -.-

But then I bought his Desire of him so no it's mine! :D
 
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