Swimming in the Android pool

[dmccunney]

We all have time sinks that soak up spare hours. My current one is an
Android tablet.

A couple of months ago, MicroCenter, a Cleveland based computer
retailer similar to the late Computerland, opened a couple of new
outlets in NYC, in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. A grand
opening promotional mailer appeared in my mail, with a coupon for a 7"
Android tablet for $20. The Brooklyn location was a hop, skip, and
jump by subway, so I bit.

The device is an Azpen A727. Azpen is Yet Another Chinese Consumer
Electronics Manufacturer targeting the budget market. They're a
MicroCenter channel partner. The A727 is a low end device, with a
dual core 1,5ghz Allwinner23 CPU (an ARM Cortex 7 model), a 7" 800x480
screen, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of flash, with a slot to add an option
microSD card up to 32GB. Retail is $80. I wouldn't pay that, but $20
was an impulse purchase. My primary use case was eBook viewer, and it
has a good form factor for that. Anything else would be gravy.

The first challenge was rooting it. There are a lot of "one click
root" solutions for Android, but they all target well known devices,
and Azpen is a new kid on the block. I found a blog post that told
how to do it. First, you had to download the Google Android SDK,
which weighs in at 560MB. Then, you had to run setup, to install it
and get the Google Android drivers, which are the only ones that would
work. You installed the drivers in Windows. Then you could set the
tablet to USB debug mode, and connect it to Windows via USB cable.
When Windows recognized the device, you could try a one click
solution, and if that failed, there were manual steps involving the
adb tool. The drivers were needed to establish communication with the
device from Windows.

My first attempt failed. I had gotten the 32 bit SDK and attempted to
install the drivers in an XP machine. Windows complained it couldn't
find the software for the device, even though the Google drivers were
where I pointed to. I assumed this was Yet Another Windows Quirk, and
tried again. this time I downloaded the 64 bit version of the SDK,
and did the driver install on the SO's Win7 laptop. As expected, that
worked. I could then use a one click solution called Kingo Root to
root the device and push the SuperSU binary to it.

One reason for rooting was to get rid of a few things pre-installed.
The A727 came with the Azpen Reader, which is an Azpen branded version
of the Blio app, which provides access to an online bookstore and an
app to read books bought from it. It also included Outlook Security,
an Android A/V and anti-malware app, Game Store, which is a Wild
Tangent online games store app, and a trial version of Mobile Systems
Office, an Android suite for dealing with MS Office files on Android.
I wanted none of them.

The scarce resource on the tablet is application storage. Internal
flash is partitioned, with a 787MB slice for applications, and a 1GB
slice seen as an internal SD card. Some applications can be told to
partially install to the card. Others must be entirely in application
storage, and I haven't found a way to expand that, so all the built in
stuff I didn't want went away to free space.

Another reason for rooting was keyboard support. The device FAQ says
an external keyboard isn't supported, and suggests using one of the
many onscreen virtual keyboard available in the Google Play Store.
The A727 came with Google's keyboard, which I replaced with the open
source Hacker's Keyboard, but virtual keyboards are painful for any
extended text entry. I had a Logitech Portable USB keyboard I wanted
to test. That required a little help: the tablet has a microUSB port,
but the Logitech keyboard uses a regular USB connector. Another trip
to MicroCenter yielded a Female USB->Male MicroUSB adapter. I also
got a 32GB microSD card, a 32GB USB thumbdrive, and found a case for
the Azpen on clearance.

As expected, rooting addressed the keyboard issue. When I plugged in
the Logitech, th4e device saw it, and a Logitech section appeared in
Settings where I could select a preferred keyboard layout. The
keyboard worked in several apps, and I could use it for text entry.

I got curious. I had a small 4 port USB hub. So I plugged the hub
into the adapter, then connected the keyboard and a USB mouse to the
hub. the tablet saw the mouse too, and I could use it to do things
instead of screen touches. So far, so good.

I then wondered if I could connect an external hard drive. I have a
512MB Seagate Free Agent USB drive, intended as a backup solution. As
it happens, I could, with a little software help. the Seagate is
formatted NTFS, but there's a freeware Android driver that adds NTFS,
HFS+,, and exFAT support. Your device has to be rooted to use it.
Plug in the Seagate to the hub, and the driver saw it and mounted it.
The Seagate doesn't have a power adapter, and expects to get it via
USB from the host. The tablet doesn't really have the power. Plugged
in bare, the driver sees it and then loses if again. But the hub is a
powered hub than can be fed from an adapter plugged into an outlet.
Once I did that, the Seagate could be used from the tablet.

Most of what the tablet is used for is reading eBooks. I use an open
source viewer called FBReaderJ, which is a Java port of a product in
C that I use on Windows and Linux.
FBReader gets the nod because it handles both ePub and Mobi (Amazon
Kindle) eBook files, and I have both types. I use Calibre on the
desktop to manage the eBook library and put books on the device. The
books get put on the 32GB external SD card and FBReaderJ opens them
from there. (The 32GB flash drive mentioned above was to greate a
portable Calibre installation, not tied to a specific machine.)

But since it's a general purpose tablet, I have a few other things.
The Google apps for Gmail and Google Drive got installed, along with
the Google+ and Google Maps app, and the YouTube app. Google apps,
alas, are *large*, and generally *can't* be installed to the card.
Several others I had installed went away to clear space, including
Google Earth and the Chrome browser. Firefox for Android *can* be
installed to the card, and does so automatically.

I looked around for something to handle Office docs. The first
candidate was Quick Office, and app I knew for Palm OS. Google bought
them and issued the Android versio of their product as freeware. But
while it worked, it was deprecated and going away. Google had migrated
the functionality to thier own Docs, Sheets, and Slidesps, and were
withdrawing Quick Office from distribution. What I went with was
Kingsoft WPS office, another freeware office package from a small
Chinese vendor. Other vendors like Documents to Go (which I use on my
Palm OS PDA) have free versions of their product, but the free
versions are limited and they really want you to buy the Pro version.
WPS Office seems to have the fullest feature set of the free products,
with enough of the basics "I don't *have* to get a pro version to to
do what I need to do.

The tablet is at a point where I might just carry it with accessories
instead of a laptop when I travel

The current fun was discovering that there are ports of DOSBOX to
Android. I used DOSBOX under Linux to run VDE, and said "Hmmm. I"
wonder...". So I installed a freeeware DOSBOX port, and dropped VDE
into a directory on the internal card. It *almost* works. The
attached screenshot is VDE running in DOSBOX on the tablet.

The crippling factor is keyboard support. I can plug in and use the
Logitech keyboard, but Ctrl-key combos simply aren't passed to VDE.
This is an issue with the DOSBOX program, because Ctrl-key combos work
in other things I have installed. There are several other DOSBOX
ports to Android, including a payware version I suspect might work
well. This was mostly just to see whether I could get VDE to run on
the tablet. I don't expect to make actual use of it, since I have
both a native text editor and a word processor app installed, so I
don't know if I'll buy the payware version. of DOSBOX to support VDE.
But it was fun to get it running, and it lets this post actually be on
topic for the list. :-)
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519