Re: Fwd: The $20 Android tablet

On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 6:52 PM, dmccunney <[email protected]> wrote:

A few updates:

> I also grabbed Google's Quick Office app.  On the TX, I still user an
> older version of Dataviz's Docs to Go, and looked at Quick Office on
> the Palm back when.  I don't anticipate doing a lot of work on MS
> Office documents on the tablet, especially since it doesn't
> (currently) support an external keyboard, but the ability to do so may
> be handy.

Quick Office is a pleasant surprise.  The big win is integration with
Google Drive. I can open a Google doc stored on my Drive, make
changes, and store it back to my Drive, as well as edit local files.

> The primary current use case for the tablet, aside from being a test
> bed to learn about Android, is eBook viewer.  (That's the primary use
> case for the PDA these days, too.)  It comes with the Blio app, but I
> have *many* eBooks I want to store locally on the tablet's expansion
> card and read from there. To that end, I installed Android versions of
> CoolReader and FBReader.  I have both under Windows and Linux, and
> both handle ePub and Mobipocket files.  Support for both is a major
> plus, as it reduces the format conversions I need to do in Calibre to
> be able to read things.  (I convert ePub to Mobi to allow me to read
> various things on the TX with the last version of Mobipocet viewer for
> Palm OS, since no one wrote an ePub viewer for Palm OS before Palm
> went belly up.)

I've settled on FBReader.  Unfortunately, while Cool Reader claims to
read Mobi files, support is incomplete.  It will open and display a
Mobi document, but not properly interpret the markup.  A lot of the
markup shows as tags in the text instead of being interpreted.
FBReader has no such issues.  CoolReader may have better support for
current ePub, but FBReader displays ePub files I've tried it on well
enough, and I'm not concerned with things like support for embedded
audio and video.

The one thing FBReader lacks is a way to assign books to series.  It
has series support, and will display books that are part of a series,
but it seems to expect that to be in the metadata for the book when
you add it.  There doesn't seem to be a way to add it after the fact.

I'll have to test with some books I've added series data to in
Calibre, and see if the Calibre metadata carries over.

>> Chrome: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.chrome
>
> Got it, and will compare with Firefox for Android.  I use Firefox as
> my default browser, and prefer it elsewhere.

Chrome and Firefox beta both work well.  Chrome has a potentially high
level of integration with other Google apps and Chrome on other
devices.

Other things added are the RealVNC client (formerly payware and now
free,) Zarchiver (since I use 7-Zip as my archiver under Windows and
p7z under Linux, this is a no brainer), Hacker's keyboard (thanks
again!), and VimTouch, a version of the Vim editor modified for touch
screens.  As it happens, there's even a port of Gnu Emacs for Android,
though getting it set up looks non-trivial.

The next step is rooting.  I actually found instructions on how to do
it.  The problem is that it requires installation of Google's Android
driver for Windows from the Android SDK, and while the SDK is
installed, Windows fails to install the driver.  It clams it can't
finds the software, even though the files are where I tell it to look.
 I've have to try from the SO's Win7 laptop.
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519