#android

I recently bought a 2018 Honda HR-V as our family car. It has a 7” touchscreen running Android 4.0.4, a version so old it predates Android Auto by about three years. It runs Android Auto now anyway, thanks to a small app I built over the course of a week.

I was showing a friend the Pokémon gen1recomp project on my phone the other day, and he wanted it on his. Easy enough. Hand over the APK and the files it needs, walk him through the setup, ten minutes while we’re sat in the same room.

Setting up a new phone always takes longer than it should, usually with at least one app or account causing grief along the way. This one didn’t, which felt almost suspicious.

Anbernic sent me an RG DS to review. It’s a clamshell Android handheld designed to evoke the Nintendo DS, running Android 14 on a Rockchip RK3568 with dual 4-inch screens. At around $95 (roughly £75), it sits in the same budget bracket as the Mangmi Air X I reviewed last year, but where that was a capable general-purpose handheld, this one has a much narrower brief.

I’ve been using Google’s Call Screening feature for a while now. I turned it on mostly to filter out calls from numbers I don’t recognise (I’ve signed up with TPS and reported numbers to the ICO, and neither has made much difference), but in practice it’s doing something I didn’t quite expect: it’s almost exclusively screening other AIs.

I recently picked up two Pixel C tablets from a seller on eBay, along with the magnetic keyboard. One tablet had a cracked screen but worked fine and wasn’t locked. The other was cosmetically perfect but the display was completely black. I figured between the two I could end up with at least one working tablet.

I’ve had a OnePlus 7 Pro sitting in a drawer for a couple of years. I used it from 2019, found it too big, got a Pixel 5, and now I’m on the Pixel 7a. The usual thing, fiddling with an old gadget that’s been kicking about doing nothing. It’s a nice phone with nice features. Shame it’s stuck on such an old version of Android. Time to get LineageOS on there.

I’ve owned plenty of Kindles and Android tablets over the years, but I’ve been curious about colour e-ink for a while - whether it’s actually useful or just a gimmick.

A banned Switch sitting on a shelf is prime hardware for Android. Turns out the Tegra X1 that powered Breath of the Wild runs a full Android OS surprisingly well.

After reviewing the Mangmi Air X, I got curious about how the firmware updates worked. Mangmi have been pushing updates fairly regularly, which is great to see on a budget device. Officially they release full update packages via Google Drive links, but those have a tendency to disappear over time. I wanted to access the OTA update packages directly and back them up to archive.org alongside the original firmware.

Back in 2015 when I reviewed devices like the GPD XD and similar Android handhelds, the whole ecosystem felt half-baked. Emulation wasn’t particularly good yet, the devices came from obscure Chinese manufacturers, the ROMs were loaded with questionable apps, and the SOCs couldn’t handle much.

Running AVD emulator from the Windows command line/Powershell/mingw32 This assumes you’ve got Android Studio installed. First you need to have the tools path in your $PATH variable, to do this edit Path in Windows’ Environment variables to include for example: C:\Users\Max\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\tools Then you can use emulator.exe from anywhere. The Android Studio docs fail to mention this. $ emulator -no-boot-anim -accel auto -writable-system -no-snapshot -gpu host -avd K10_API_22 Installing Google Play Services I’ve been messing around with older device profiles, and trying to run things in Chrome on Android 5.0 (API level 21). You’ll need to sideload the Google Play services system APKs (from a gapps package for your target system, e.g. for Android 5.0, but you might find that the /system partition is full. No problem, you can sideload to /sdcard and symlink: $ adb remount # Fails... $ adb push .\GmsCore.apk /system/priv-app $ adb: error: failed to copy '.\GmsCore.apk' to '/system/priv-app/GmsCore.apk': No space left on device # Works... $ adb push .\GmsCore.apk /sdcard/system/priv-app $ adb push .\GoogleLoginService.apk /sdcard/system/priv-app $ adb push .\GoogleServicesFramework.apk /sdcard/system/priv-app $ adb push .\Phonesky.apk /sdcard/system/priv-app # Symlink them $ adb shell ln -s /sdcard/system/priv-app/GmsCore.apk /system/priv-app/GmsCore.apk $ adb shell ln -s /sdcard/system/priv-app/GoogleLoginService.apk /system/priv-app/GoogleLoginService.apk $ adb shell ln -s /sdcard/system/priv-app/GoogleServicesFramework.apk /system/priv-app/GoogleServicesFramework.apk $ adb shell ln -s /sdcard/system/priv-app/Phonesky.apk /system/priv-app/Phonesky.apk $ adb shell stop $ adb shell start Messing around with /etc/hosts It’s trivial to edit the /etc/hosts on your AVD, but it only works if you have blank new line at the end of the hosts file. $ adb pull /etc/hosts hosts $ nano hosts # make your changes to the hosts file locally... $ adb push hosts /etc/hosts

The Virtoba S1 is a Daydream compatible controller from China that costs around £15 ($20). Let me just start with saying I’ve got a lot of cheap Bluetooth controllers – and for the most part they’re crap. I hit the “Buy now” button for the Virtoba S1 half expecting this to be the case, but I was quite happily wrong.

I enabled Google Daydream support on my OnePlus 3T today and I’m pretty impressed.

I’ve been on the hunt for a 10” tablet for a couple of months now. Besides Google’s Pixel C, there isn’t much choice in this area (ignoring the iPad). There are a bunch of options for cheap Atom-based Android/Windows tablets on Gearbest/Aliexpress/etc. I decided to buy a Chuwi Vi10 Plus on Gearbest. For less than £120 what could I lose?

I jumped on Android 6.0 Marshmallow as soon as the developer images were available to flash, and to be honest as far as “major releases” go, it was pretty underwhelming. A lot of the new features aren’t things I need, and I’ve found myself running in to a bug with device orientation in Chrome (only!) not working.

I’m back with another Android console out of China from GPD, the GPD XD. I’ve had the GPD XD for a couple of weeks now, and to be honest I’ve been unable to put it down! In short it’s a great device for portable gaming, and it also handles my media needs with ease. This device was generously provided by Geekbuying, so I’ll provide more information about where to buy the GPD XD from the Geekbuying store at the end of this review.

A different sort of review today, the Mars G01 Game Pad from Tronsmart. Geekbuying provided me with this G01 to review, so first of all a thanks to them for that. I’ll mention where you can purchase the G01 at the end of the review.

I’ve got another Android gaming handheld to review, the GPD G5A from GamePad Digital. I’ve had this device for a little while now, and have played with it loads. This device was sent to my directly from GPD back in February, but I’ve been too busy with life to write up a review.

Hot on the heels of my last Android device review I’m back with another device: The GPD G7 Quad-core from GamePad Digital. The G7 is very similar to the JXD 7800B, but with a more ergonomic game-controller shape to it.

It has been a while since I’ve had a new portable console to play with (and I’m still waiting for my GCW to arrive!), so let’s ease back in to this stuff with an Android-powered console from JinXang Digital (JXD): The JXD 7800B.

Earlier this year, Jenny got a Fitbit Zip, it’s basically a pedometer, but with the added cool-factor that it can synchronise over Bluetoooth with your computer (and some mobile devices), so that you can see statistics about your daily step count, active times of the day, etc. all online.

… Google Hangouts for Chrome needs some work.

The long-speculated consolidation of Google Talk, Google+ Hangouts, and Google Video Chat has finally occured, and it’s pretty spectacular. My digital life is so dependent on Google services that it’s nice to find some cross-platform consolidation.

Last week, a Ubuntu native installer for the Nexus 7 was released, along with instructions on how to install Ubuntu on the Nexus 7. The plan is that the Nexus 7 will be the ‘core’ device that Canonical will build their tablet version of Ubuntu around. Right now, it’s quite experimental – the interface sees no tweaks for the tablet interface, beyond having an onscreen keyboard available.

I’ve been putting this post off, and it has been hard. I usually like to declare my love for a new gadget just moments or hours after unboxing it; I’ve had a lot of tablets over the past couple of years that I’ve done that with, only to later change my mind, so I thought I’d use the Nexus 7 for a little while and then splooge about how much I love it, here on my blog.

I decided to buy an Android-powered set top box because my Apple TV 1 didn’t cut it for playing HD media, and I find it inconvenient to hook my MacBook up to the TV everytime I want to watch some HD media.