Not an iPad 2
There's a lot of hype around the recent release of the iPad 2. By a strange synchronous quirk of fate, I found myself paddling in the shallow end of the tablet PC ocean. Here are the results of my fishing about.
My Mother recently won a small, cheap, 7" Android Tablet PC in a raffle. In her words, she "didn't have a use for the (bl00dy) thing", and so she sent it to me.
Hello Robot
'Android' is the name of the operating system it uses. An operating system is the thing that sits on your computer and lets you open programs, move and delete files, manages the icons, puts the little clock in the corner of the screen and so on. Windows is an operating system, and is the most common one on PCs, if you use a Mac you've probably got OS/X, and if you have a beard you'll probably be using Linux. Small devices like mobile phones and tablets use either iOS or Android. Apple make iOS, and Google make Android.
The item itself had no manufacturer details, and to this day I have no idea who assembled it. I haven't opened it up yet to have a poke around inside, partially because there's something rattling around in there and so I fear for the structural integrity of the device. Whatever is moving around in there is small, and no doubt one of those small, odd-shaped things that bounces and will do it's best to escape the moment the case is opened.
Following the instructions (which covered how to charge the thing, and warned me not to immerse it in water) I plugged in the charger, and turned it on. A green dancing Robot appeared while it booted.
Connecting it to the Net
The first thing to do is to get it to connect to the net. Picking up a WiFi signal should be s simple matter of turning on the WiFi, finding an access point, and entering the security key. However I had problems with all three stages.
The WiFi kept tuning itself off, which meant I kept having to go back to the home page, prodding the WiFi button, scrolling down to the 'Turn wiFi on' option, turning it on, waiting 30 seconds for it to scan the available networks and then turn itself off again. Sometimes it would crash, necessitating a restart. Hello Robot.
If the WiFi stayed on long enough to select my home network, then it would then lose it again after assigning me a dynamic IP address (this is a bit like the device's phone number, which the network uses to identify the device). Sometimes it would crash during this process.
On the odd occasion it found my network *and* stayed on, I was then prompted for my security code. This had to be entered using the stylus on a virtual keyboard, and unfortunately the screen/stylus combo aren't very responsive so it took a few attempt to type in a code that looks something like "99D767BAC38EA23B0C0176D15". The inevitable typos led to a crash and having to reboot. Hello Robot.
Once the code was entered I was cheered to see that the device remembered it, before shutting the WiFi off again.
A subsequent reboot revealed that the device remembers the WiFi codes and will attempt to connect on booting. A optimistic-looking Wireless Signal Icon appeared in the menu bar, only for WiFi to be turned off the instant I used anything that required it, such as a browser.
By now the device was getting dangerously warm. Not the usual 'warm' you get when charging a phone or laptop, but the kind of 'warm' you get from an old set of 1970s Christmas Tree Lights. The kind of warm that's uncomfortable to have near your body.
I reasoned that the charging process and resultant heat (a) may have something to do with the WiFi problems by causing some sort of interference and (b) may indicate that the battery was charged (or at least about to melt), so I unplugged the charger and lo, the WiFi stayed on.
In fact, the WiFi and connection was fine once the power supply was taken out of the equation, and the device continued to work happily for a good couple of hours before the juice ran out.
Surfing away, I decided to browse for some Apps. It's worth noting at this point that the word 'App' is short for 'Application', not 'Apple', and 'Application' is a generic term for a bit of software that does something. Recently Apple had a legal spat with Amazon about Amazon's Android App Store being called an 'App Store', however as I understand it common sense has prevailed and Amazon are now allowed to call their online repository of fart apps and picture slideshows an App Store, in the same way that someone who sells bicycles is allowed to call their outlet a 'Bike Shop'.
Shopping for Apps
My first port of call was the official Android Market App Store.
After digging out my never-used gmail password and logging into Google, I navigated my browser to the online app store. I tried to buy Shredder Chess fo Android, but was told that I had no mobile device attached to my Google account. OK, so Google wants me to register my device with them for some nefarious reason. I don't know why, and don't know why I can't just download the file over the internet. I don't have to register my PC with Steam.
Putting this aside for the time being, I try to register my little tablet PC. To no avail. Google seem to think that every Android device has a phone number, and they require it for registering your device. However my tablet doesn't have a phone number, because it's not a phone.
In effect, this means that the Android Market is closed off and no use to me. I cannot even buy an app and download it on to my PC and sideload it on to the tablet using a USB cable. Madness.
Anyway, I reason that as Android is a fairly open system I may be able to find somewhere else to download apps, either on to my tablet directly, or on to my PC. I Google for alternative app stores and sources of apps.
At first glance, there are loads of 'Android app stores' on the internet. However most have one drawback: they're not actually stores at all, they're just websites that carry adverts, lists of apps, and download buttons that *link directly back to the Android Marketplace*.
Some do actually carry .apk files, however they come with their own issues. Notably 'AppBrain' requires it's own AppBrain app to be downloaded in order to download the other apps from its site, but you can only get this from the Android Market, thus rendering the exercise rather pointless.
The Internet: Satan's Own Engine of Lies and Deceit
This put me in mind of a situation I had years ago, where I was looking for cracked software. This was back in the days before The PirateBay and Torrents, and at a time when one would reasonably expect to find a site, click on a download link and be done with it. Not so. I kept finding Warez sites all over the place, however every time you clicked on 'Download Now!' or whatever on one of them, another Warez site would open, again promising you a world of cracked, free software joy. Eventually you realise it's all just lies, damned lies, designed to build up click count, stick dodgy stuff on your PC and gain advertising revenue. Great if you have lots of banner ads on a pay-per-view basis, damned annoying and a complete waste of time if you're just trying to get hold of a file.
A similar principle seems to apply to most, if not all, of these purported Android App Stores: zero files hosted, the same user reviews on site after site, loads of adverts (presumably pay-per-view) and links from their pages back to the Android Market. You also see a similar state of affairs on those 'Watch TV for free!' sites, free eBook sites, in fact any site where one might be looking for 'free' stuff.
I tried to install the Amazon Appstore, unfortunately it's US-only at the moment.
To make matters mildly worse, there doesn't appear to be a 'canonical' support site or network for Android users. Apart from the official Android website, which contains details of the OS for developers, there's not much there for users. I even spent a good ten minutes googling to try and find out how to delete an icon off the start screen, and eventually found the answer *on a forum*.
After much Googling and trawling through settings, I worked out that the version of Android on this poor little machine (I had started to feel a bit sorry for it by now) was 1.6. Now with most operating systems you can upgrade them. Linux will do it automatically if you want it to, Windows and OS X need a bit of money upfront, but I could find no instructions on upgrading Android to 2.2 anywhere, nor what the hardware requirements were for that release.
This whole situation is an utterly bewildering state of affairs. I must be missing something really obvious, but from the inability of the tablet to surf the net whilst charging, through to Google seeming to lock tablets out of the Android Market and the general lack of any usable info on upgrading and basic operation, we appear to have a device whose operation and support appear to have been designed by a combination of Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka.
The damned annoying thing is that I want it to work, and work well. It's almost tempting me to go out and buy a decent Android tablet with a proper app store on it.
Unfortunately I've grown rather attached to it after all that ballyhoo, so I'll persevere.
Obtaining Decent Android Software Without Using the Android Marketplace
Applying myself to the issue at hand, I used every every erg of Google-fu at my disposal, and found the following site:
http://android-apk.info/
Most of the language is in Arabic, but it allowed me to download the .apk for the wonderful Opera browser, which transformed the machine into a useable way of surfing the web. You can also get the .apk directly from Opera here, I chose Opera Mini 6 for Android.
Chess on Android
OK, so that's webbing sorted. Next I needed some chess software. Ideally it would be Shredder chess, but that only appears to be available from the Android Market place. I found this instead, from the wonderful Chess.com site:
http://www.chess.com/download/view/chesscom-for-android-phones--devices
This enables online play, logging into Chess.com, watching tutorial vids and also gives you tactics training. More Googling revealed Aart Bik's Chess for Android:
http://www.aartbik.com/MISC/chess.html
Aart Bik works for Google, and from the looks of his site has hardcore coding skills the likes of which many of us mere mortals can only dream. His chess program allows use of different chess engines, such as Stockfish, as well.
EDIT: I'd like to add Chess Free at the AndAppStore, which looks nice and polished.
SlideME is a nice, open appstore. It has a large number of apps that are readily downloadable with no need to register anything:
http://slideme.org/
They also have their own marketplace app as well. Make sure you have an SD card in your device for extra capacity though. anyway,
SlideMe had the Amazon Kindle .apk as well, so that got downloaded and stuck on the machine too.
To summarise I managed to get a bog-standard, white-label, anonymously-manufactured Android 1.6 device into a pleasantly usable state with a few workarounds. I hope this is useful to anyone else in a similar situation, however I find it rather strange that Google appear to be trumpeting the 'openness' of their Android system whilst at the same time not exactly being very helpful regarding teh appstore or the OS.
So, what I want to know is the following:
1 - Why can't I download apps from the Android Market to my PC and sideload them via USB on to my tablet?
2 - Why can't I download the Android Market on to my PC, and sideload that into my tablet so I can download Market apps to my Tablet directly?
3 - Dammit, why can't I download and install the Android Market to my tablet off the internet via the browser?
4 - Why do I have to have an Android device registered with Google to use the Market in the first place?
5 - Why wont it let me register my tablet online from the tablet?
6 - Why does Google seem to think that tablets have phone numbers?
7 - Why is it so difficult to upgrade the Android OS? Why doesn't it have a 'Check for updates' function? I suspect that this may be due to the wildly different hardware configuration, but Linux manages admirably.
My Mother recently won a small, cheap, 7" Android Tablet PC in a raffle. In her words, she "didn't have a use for the (bl00dy) thing", and so she sent it to me.
Hello Robot
'Android' is the name of the operating system it uses. An operating system is the thing that sits on your computer and lets you open programs, move and delete files, manages the icons, puts the little clock in the corner of the screen and so on. Windows is an operating system, and is the most common one on PCs, if you use a Mac you've probably got OS/X, and if you have a beard you'll probably be using Linux. Small devices like mobile phones and tablets use either iOS or Android. Apple make iOS, and Google make Android.
The item itself had no manufacturer details, and to this day I have no idea who assembled it. I haven't opened it up yet to have a poke around inside, partially because there's something rattling around in there and so I fear for the structural integrity of the device. Whatever is moving around in there is small, and no doubt one of those small, odd-shaped things that bounces and will do it's best to escape the moment the case is opened.
Following the instructions (which covered how to charge the thing, and warned me not to immerse it in water) I plugged in the charger, and turned it on. A green dancing Robot appeared while it booted.
Connecting it to the Net
The first thing to do is to get it to connect to the net. Picking up a WiFi signal should be s simple matter of turning on the WiFi, finding an access point, and entering the security key. However I had problems with all three stages.
The WiFi kept tuning itself off, which meant I kept having to go back to the home page, prodding the WiFi button, scrolling down to the 'Turn wiFi on' option, turning it on, waiting 30 seconds for it to scan the available networks and then turn itself off again. Sometimes it would crash, necessitating a restart. Hello Robot.
If the WiFi stayed on long enough to select my home network, then it would then lose it again after assigning me a dynamic IP address (this is a bit like the device's phone number, which the network uses to identify the device). Sometimes it would crash during this process.
On the odd occasion it found my network *and* stayed on, I was then prompted for my security code. This had to be entered using the stylus on a virtual keyboard, and unfortunately the screen/stylus combo aren't very responsive so it took a few attempt to type in a code that looks something like "99D767BAC38EA23B0C0176D15". The inevitable typos led to a crash and having to reboot. Hello Robot.
Once the code was entered I was cheered to see that the device remembered it, before shutting the WiFi off again.
A subsequent reboot revealed that the device remembers the WiFi codes and will attempt to connect on booting. A optimistic-looking Wireless Signal Icon appeared in the menu bar, only for WiFi to be turned off the instant I used anything that required it, such as a browser.
By now the device was getting dangerously warm. Not the usual 'warm' you get when charging a phone or laptop, but the kind of 'warm' you get from an old set of 1970s Christmas Tree Lights. The kind of warm that's uncomfortable to have near your body.
I reasoned that the charging process and resultant heat (a) may have something to do with the WiFi problems by causing some sort of interference and (b) may indicate that the battery was charged (or at least about to melt), so I unplugged the charger and lo, the WiFi stayed on.
In fact, the WiFi and connection was fine once the power supply was taken out of the equation, and the device continued to work happily for a good couple of hours before the juice ran out.
Surfing away, I decided to browse for some Apps. It's worth noting at this point that the word 'App' is short for 'Application', not 'Apple', and 'Application' is a generic term for a bit of software that does something. Recently Apple had a legal spat with Amazon about Amazon's Android App Store being called an 'App Store', however as I understand it common sense has prevailed and Amazon are now allowed to call their online repository of fart apps and picture slideshows an App Store, in the same way that someone who sells bicycles is allowed to call their outlet a 'Bike Shop'.
Shopping for Apps
My first port of call was the official Android Market App Store.
After digging out my never-used gmail password and logging into Google, I navigated my browser to the online app store. I tried to buy Shredder Chess fo Android, but was told that I had no mobile device attached to my Google account. OK, so Google wants me to register my device with them for some nefarious reason. I don't know why, and don't know why I can't just download the file over the internet. I don't have to register my PC with Steam.
Putting this aside for the time being, I try to register my little tablet PC. To no avail. Google seem to think that every Android device has a phone number, and they require it for registering your device. However my tablet doesn't have a phone number, because it's not a phone.
In effect, this means that the Android Market is closed off and no use to me. I cannot even buy an app and download it on to my PC and sideload it on to the tablet using a USB cable. Madness.
Anyway, I reason that as Android is a fairly open system I may be able to find somewhere else to download apps, either on to my tablet directly, or on to my PC. I Google for alternative app stores and sources of apps.
At first glance, there are loads of 'Android app stores' on the internet. However most have one drawback: they're not actually stores at all, they're just websites that carry adverts, lists of apps, and download buttons that *link directly back to the Android Marketplace*.
Some do actually carry .apk files, however they come with their own issues. Notably 'AppBrain' requires it's own AppBrain app to be downloaded in order to download the other apps from its site, but you can only get this from the Android Market, thus rendering the exercise rather pointless.
The Internet: Satan's Own Engine of Lies and Deceit
This put me in mind of a situation I had years ago, where I was looking for cracked software. This was back in the days before The PirateBay and Torrents, and at a time when one would reasonably expect to find a site, click on a download link and be done with it. Not so. I kept finding Warez sites all over the place, however every time you clicked on 'Download Now!' or whatever on one of them, another Warez site would open, again promising you a world of cracked, free software joy. Eventually you realise it's all just lies, damned lies, designed to build up click count, stick dodgy stuff on your PC and gain advertising revenue. Great if you have lots of banner ads on a pay-per-view basis, damned annoying and a complete waste of time if you're just trying to get hold of a file.
A similar principle seems to apply to most, if not all, of these purported Android App Stores: zero files hosted, the same user reviews on site after site, loads of adverts (presumably pay-per-view) and links from their pages back to the Android Market. You also see a similar state of affairs on those 'Watch TV for free!' sites, free eBook sites, in fact any site where one might be looking for 'free' stuff.
I tried to install the Amazon Appstore, unfortunately it's US-only at the moment.
To make matters mildly worse, there doesn't appear to be a 'canonical' support site or network for Android users. Apart from the official Android website, which contains details of the OS for developers, there's not much there for users. I even spent a good ten minutes googling to try and find out how to delete an icon off the start screen, and eventually found the answer *on a forum*.
After much Googling and trawling through settings, I worked out that the version of Android on this poor little machine (I had started to feel a bit sorry for it by now) was 1.6. Now with most operating systems you can upgrade them. Linux will do it automatically if you want it to, Windows and OS X need a bit of money upfront, but I could find no instructions on upgrading Android to 2.2 anywhere, nor what the hardware requirements were for that release.
This whole situation is an utterly bewildering state of affairs. I must be missing something really obvious, but from the inability of the tablet to surf the net whilst charging, through to Google seeming to lock tablets out of the Android Market and the general lack of any usable info on upgrading and basic operation, we appear to have a device whose operation and support appear to have been designed by a combination of Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka.
The damned annoying thing is that I want it to work, and work well. It's almost tempting me to go out and buy a decent Android tablet with a proper app store on it.
Unfortunately I've grown rather attached to it after all that ballyhoo, so I'll persevere.
Obtaining Decent Android Software Without Using the Android Marketplace
Applying myself to the issue at hand, I used every every erg of Google-fu at my disposal, and found the following site:
http://android-apk.info/
Most of the language is in Arabic, but it allowed me to download the .apk for the wonderful Opera browser, which transformed the machine into a useable way of surfing the web. You can also get the .apk directly from Opera here, I chose Opera Mini 6 for Android.
Chess on Android
OK, so that's webbing sorted. Next I needed some chess software. Ideally it would be Shredder chess, but that only appears to be available from the Android Market place. I found this instead, from the wonderful Chess.com site:
http://www.chess.com/download/view/chesscom-for-android-phones--devices
This enables online play, logging into Chess.com, watching tutorial vids and also gives you tactics training. More Googling revealed Aart Bik's Chess for Android:
http://www.aartbik.com/MISC/chess.html
Aart Bik works for Google, and from the looks of his site has hardcore coding skills the likes of which many of us mere mortals can only dream. His chess program allows use of different chess engines, such as Stockfish, as well.
EDIT: I'd like to add Chess Free at the AndAppStore, which looks nice and polished.
SlideME is a nice, open appstore. It has a large number of apps that are readily downloadable with no need to register anything:
http://slideme.org/
They also have their own marketplace app as well. Make sure you have an SD card in your device for extra capacity though. anyway,
SlideMe had the Amazon Kindle .apk as well, so that got downloaded and stuck on the machine too.
To summarise I managed to get a bog-standard, white-label, anonymously-manufactured Android 1.6 device into a pleasantly usable state with a few workarounds. I hope this is useful to anyone else in a similar situation, however I find it rather strange that Google appear to be trumpeting the 'openness' of their Android system whilst at the same time not exactly being very helpful regarding teh appstore or the OS.
So, what I want to know is the following:
1 - Why can't I download apps from the Android Market to my PC and sideload them via USB on to my tablet?
2 - Why can't I download the Android Market on to my PC, and sideload that into my tablet so I can download Market apps to my Tablet directly?
3 - Dammit, why can't I download and install the Android Market to my tablet off the internet via the browser?
4 - Why do I have to have an Android device registered with Google to use the Market in the first place?
5 - Why wont it let me register my tablet online from the tablet?
6 - Why does Google seem to think that tablets have phone numbers?
7 - Why is it so difficult to upgrade the Android OS? Why doesn't it have a 'Check for updates' function? I suspect that this may be due to the wildly different hardware configuration, but Linux manages admirably.