[Nothing But Tablets]

Google shows it actually listens to it’s customers through Music authorization snafu

Written by Bryan Faulkner on 18 May 2012 | 1 comment

Just about everyone is aware of the idea of authorizing devices for different apps. There are lots of pieces of software that allow you to install one licensed version on multiple devices. You probably are most familiar with Apple’s iTunes allowing you to authorize up to five devices to use music, apps, movies, and more that you purchase with your Apple account. If you are anything like me you’ve probably gotten an error message before that you are over your authorization limit and must deauthorize a device in order to then add another trusted device to your account. Google Music also has such an authorization limit, but it is set to 10 different devices that can be allowed to access your account at one time.

Now you’re probably thinking who has 10 devices that they would want to run Google Music on? Probably not too many people, but the issue with Google Music is that ever time you flash a new ROM on your device, and then install Google Music, it sees that device as a new one to be authorized. If you are a flash-a-holic you could quickly get to that 10 device limit, all on the same device. No big deal, you just go to play.google.com/music and deauthorize some devices to make room for the new ones. A problem arose earlier this week however. An XDA member noticed that Google had changed its deauthorization policy and only allowed you to deauthorize four devices a year, instead of the unlimited number that you could previously. Of course there was no formal news post about this from Google, and there was a huge uproar from the community when it was discovered.

I’m far from a flash-a-holic with my Android devices, but I like to try different ROMs out when I see something interesting. Between my phone and tablet it would not take me long to hit that 14 device per year maximum and then not be able to access my Google Music account from my devices. The problem lies in how Google Music identifies the device to be authorized. It sees every new software install as a new piece of hardware, and until Google can figure out how to recognize the hardware, despite what software is on it, there will be problems with those in the root community. To Googles credit they reacted very quickly to the uproar from the community. Within 48 hours of the change being discovered, they have reversed their decision and lifted the four device per year limit.

This is great news for the root community, and the public as a whole, even though most people won’t ever know about it. For such a large company to care about something most people would see as something very minor is pretty unusual. It shows that Google actually cares about what the root community cares about, and doesn’t want to lose even that small percentage of its customer base. Let’s face it, if Google kept this limit in place, when a user hit that 14 device limit for the year do you think they would just stop listening to music? No, they would then find a different app that worked better for them, and Google would lose out. I see it all the time where companies make a drastic change, a lot of times to the look and feel of their software, and it’s not received well by the community. Usually the community just has to deal with it and the company inevitably loses customers due to their being unhappy and perceived as out of touch with its users. It’s good that Google wasn’t too high and mighty to reverse a change that wasn’t for the best.

[Android Community]

CDI Computers releases UNOBOOK, targeted at schools

Written by Bryan Faulkner on 17 May 2012 | No comments

Working IT in a school has shown me there are lots of challenges to deal with when it comes to choosing devices to deploy. Not only do you have to look at what you want to do with the device, you also have to look at who will be using them, restrictions that need to be put in place, what kind of network infrastructure you need, how you are going to keep them powered, how to keep them up to date, and lots of other things. As we are nearing the end of the school year, we have about 300 computers of various forms that we are looking at needing to replace. There has been lots of talk about using tablets in the future at the school. They already have 60 iPads, and are looking at the idea of replacing hard copies of books with Kindles. Every elementary classroom has a couple of desktop computer that we are looking at replacing. The idea came up to replace them with tablets, and so we started looking at our options. We got in contact with a company called CDI Computers to handle some things and in some of their material discovered they were making a tablet called the UNOBOOK.

At the time we got the material there wasn’t a whole lot of information available on the UNOBOOK. It wasn’t yet in production, and their own website didn’t even have any information on it. It was supposed to be an 8-inch tablet running Android 4.0.3 with a gig of RAM and an eight hour battery life. That’s about all the information I could find on it. Earlier this week I got a copy of their PDF marketing material for the UNOBOOK, and it answers a lot of the questions I had regarding the device. All the stuff I had heard before is true, and I found out a bunch more. It comes with an A9 1Ghz processor, rugged aluminum body, two cameras (front & rear), 16GB Flash storage, HDMI output, USB port (I assume full size since it doesn’t say mini), microphone, and a microSD card slot. When you order an UNOBOOK it will also come with a leather case and stylus. All in all it sounds like it could be a decent tablet, depending on the price.

There seems to be two views when it comes to schools and money. Some companies seem to think that schools have a ton of money they can spend on technology and so they mark their products way up. I found a company marketing a tablet for elementary kids for $1000. Upon further inspection I found it was just an Asus Transformer TF100 tablet with some custom software. You can buy that tablet for $300 so what makes this company think it is worth $1000? The other camp knows that schools don’t always have a ton of money to spend on new devices. This is where CDI comes in and they have priced the UNOBOOK at a respectable $297. That’s a great price considering that the tablet also comes with it’s own leather case and stylus, which depending on quality, could run anywhere from $30-50 on there own, making the tablet come in at around $250. That seems very reasonable for a tablet marketed at schools.

The UNOBOOK was supposed to be released for sale this last Monday, but other than the material I received through the school, there is no other information available online about it. CDI’s website doesn’t even have any information. The only reason for this that I can think of is that they wanted a very slow launch of the device since they have never done anything with tablets before and don’t want to get in over their head. Whatever the reason why there isn’t any information available, I do know that they sent out a simple one page flyer to some people on their mailing list about the availability of the tablet. Below you will find a link to download the full four page PDF i received, plus images of each page in case you don’t want to download the PDF. It will be interesting to see if this tablet takes off in the school market.

[CDI Computers]

Hit the break to download the PDF or view the images.

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Kickstarter spotlight: Chameleon launcher

Written by Andreas Ødegård on 17 May 2012 | 1 comment

Seeing Android software on Kickstarter is nice, especially when it’s something that actually looks good. Chameleon is an Android launcher designed specifically for tablets, and the developer is now looking for funding through our favorite crowd funding site. Chameleon is trying to bring a new type of launcher to market by targeting high resolution (1280 x 800+) tablets where a single page of a home screen is treated as a separate home screen, with the other pages sort of working like separate home screens. The idea is that you then switch between these home screens based on what you’re doing, e.g. work, media, etc. This is similar to hub style launcher setups that are common among people who really get into home screen customization, but with greater focus on the independence of each home screen, and with the ability to automate which home screen is default by location, time, etc.

There are however quite a few problems with this launcher the way I see it. First of all, limiting it to 1280 x 800 makes very little sense in the Android world where PPI controls the size of a UI to a much greater extent than resolution. This peculiar requirement would for instance lock out the Touchpad’s 9.7-inch 1024 x 768 display, while allowing the Galaxy Tab 7.7′s smaller 1280 x 800 pixel display to use the launcher. Logic? None that I can see. I also think that they’re marketing the wrong part of the launcher by doing what they’re doing. Looking at the video, the tablet UI that they show off is beautiful, all thanks to special Chameleon widgets that are unlike anything I’ve seen in the way they make the home screen look. Those widgets are mentioned as a side note on the Kickstarter page however, while all attention is focused on the ability to switch home screens based on things like location.

The problem with that? Tasker already allows you to do that with a few different launchers, with a much wider array of triggers than what Chameleon offers. In other words, they’re trying to get funding for something that exists – and patent it in the process – while the product they have that’s actually rather new and extraordinary is a side note. Having the functionality in the app itself instead of in Tasker counts for something of course, but if I had been the developer, I would have made a bigger deal of the UI and focused less on the automation part of it all. Still kept it in there, but not as the main feature, and made sure that the launcher would also work with Tasker out of the box.

I’m also unsure if an Android launcher will be able to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter. Android has a reputation for having users that don’t want to pay for anything, so it will be interesting to see if that “curse” strikes again. I do want this project to succeed though, and I think Android really needs a launcher that’s truly made for tablets. One thing’s for certain, it’s been a long time since my jaw has dropped when seeing a home screen, but the Chameleon UI did it – which is why I think that should be its selling point.

[Kickstarter]

Would you buy an iPad 2.5?

Written by Andreas Ødegård on 16 May 2012 | 4 comments

The iPad 3 is special in one way: it’s not often you see a follow-up product that isn’t definitely better than what it’s replacing. The iPad 3 is heavier and thicker than the iPad 2, takes way longer to charge, doesn’t last as long on a charge, and is more expensive. What’s responsible for all of that? The screen. That “revolutionary”, 3 megapixel beast they put in there because people demanded it.

The big question when you think about this trade off is what the iPad 3 would be like without that screen. Let’s assume for a second that Apple stuck with the old type of screen, but kept all the other changes – including the thickness and weight. The new 32nm chip used in the $399 iPad 2 improves battery life over last year’s model, and have been measured to last over 15 hours when playing HD video. On a 25Wh battery. Imagine that device being powered by the 42.5Wh battery in the iPad 3 instead – 20 hours of use more or less regardless of what you do should be doable, and numbers closer to 30 hours for more power efficient tasks. Add to that a quad core graphics chip that is now being used to power the screen, but imagine it being used to actually improve graphics on games and such instead. Finally, that 5 megapixel camera to finally give the iPad 2 a decent camera.

Would you buy such a device, one that trades a high resolution screen for power and battery life? I know some would, some wouldn’t. Personally I would have liked some sort of screen update, just not one that comes with so much baggage. I think a lot of people who use the iPad for business and things like that would happily make the trade though, as it would make it a true all day computing device that doesn’t care if you leave the screen on for hours at an end. On the other hand, that new screen has a lot of people spellbound, and it helps with a lot of business related tasks as well by opening up for a better reading experience on the thing. A hard choice indeed, but that’s kinda the point: when a new device makes so many sacrifices that an alternative version without its main selling point can be equally attractive, that product definitely has some serious issues.

HP Touchpad modded with 300mA USB host port

Written by Andreas Ødegård on 16 May 2012 | No comments

Getting enough power out of a USB host port has been a constant pain with mobile devices. USB is designed to provide 500mA, which means that a lot of peripherals require that to work. Some devices are even so bad that they make USB flash drives incompatible by providing way less power than what’s needed even for such use, and sometimes a flashing LED on a flash drive can push it over the limit.

An HP Touchpad owner who calls himself “ften” grew tired of this issue and decided to do something about it. He added a 5V step up converter to the Touchpad’s battery and wired that to a secondary microUSB port that a special dual-ended host cable can hook up to in addition to the normal microUSB port, and by doing so increase the USB host port’s power output to about 300mA. That will still not be enough for power hungry accessories like hard drives, but it will be plenty for flash drives, mice, keyboards, and things like that.

This does naturally affect battery life of the Touchpad when in use, but not as much as many people would think. Well worth it to not have to deal with those idiotic high power messages that you come across on all sorts of devices if you ask me, and I think that manufacturers should start providing more power to these USB ports so users don’t have to do it themselves.

[RootzWiki via Hackaday]

Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus available for £200 in the UK

Written by Andreas Ødegård on 16 May 2012 | 2 comments

If the $200 price point is magic in the US, £200 is close to that in the UK. It’s more money in terms of direct conversion, but both income and prices are higher in Europe. When the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus then makes it down to the £200 point in the UK, that’s a big deal. The tablet only ever made it down to $300 in the US, with the new Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 being released at $250. The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is the more premium of the two though, so seeing it at that price point really is something.

The model that’s going for this low rate is a EU model sold with a UK plug adapter, WiFi-only, and 16GB of storage. Add to that a microSDHC slot, GPS, dual cameras, 1GB of RAM, and Exynos chipset and you really have a device worth the money. I should know, I have one.

[Expansys via XDA]

Brookstone releases scanner dock for the iPad

Written by Andreas Ødegård on 14 May 2012 | No comments

iOS compatible scanners is nothing new, but it’s a rare enough accessory that a new one is worth mentioning. With the iPad 3 you could of course just use Scanner Pro, but if you’re after a more conventional type of scanner, Brookstone’s iConvert might be for you. $150 gets you a scanner with an integrated iPad dock that scans documents straight into the iPad’s photo library. It’s as simple as that, and that’s another reason why this would be a good choice over simply software/camera scanning. It looks better in an office environment too, and $150 isn’t too bad if you have a lot of paper documents you want gone.

[Brookstone]

How to use Tasker to create sleep timers

Written by Andreas Ødegård on 13 May 2012 | No comments

Tasker is extremely powerful, and I use it for all sorts of things on my phone. One thing that it really does well is sleep timers, i.e. turning off things after a certain period of time. Some apps have such a feature built in, but even those aren’t as advanced as what Tasker can do if you really sit down and learn the ropes. The video goes through some basic ways of using Tasker this way, covering both a media player timer, a children’s play time timer and a work time management timer.

Use a keyboard and mouse to play games on Android

Written by Andreas Ødegård on 13 May 2012 | No comments

One thing I didn’t cover in our Android game controller guide is USB/BT Joystick Center’s new ability to use a mouse and keyboard to control games via root-only touch emulation. I haven’t played around with it myself yet, but YouTube user 527Andreas (which despite the name is not me) has, and it’s his video you can see above. Seems to be working quite nicely, especially with the Transformer’s keyboard dock. PC gamers always complain about consoles and their game controllers, so it’s ironic seeing something that is even lower on some people’s “real game scale” be controlled with “proper” hardware.

[Google Play]

Matsunichi MarquisPad MP977 tablet coming this month for $249

Written by Andreas Ødegård on 13 May 2012 | No comments

With companies like Samsung getting in on the budget tablet market, there’s more competition in a field that used to contain mostly cheap, unknown brands. As a result, we’re seeing better specs on such devices, and the MarquisPad MP977 is proof of that. With a dual core 1.2GHz TI chip, 1GB of RAM, and a 768 x 1024 9.7-inch screen it’s well within its right to hover around the $250 mark, and brings a much larger screen to the game than most of the tablets in that price range. That in itself makes it an option for people who think tablets like the Kindle Fire are too small, as it’s the same screen size and resolution as the iPad 1 and 2.

The price does mean cutbacks here and there though, like with storage. 4GB is all you get, but half of that is on an SD card that you can upgrade up to 32GB. The camera is also not all that, being VGA (640 x 480, 0.3 megapixels) only, and seeing a 30 pin connector in a device like this is peculiar. Perhaps the biggest drawback is the battery, which only lasts up to about 5 hours. Still, all things considered, it’s not a bad deal for $249 when it releases later this month.

[Matsunichi via Engadget]