So, Android, on a tablet. Mrr.
Perhaps a bit of background first. My mum after 20 years of begging, pleading and coaxing finally found ‘a use’ for the computer. She’s not into the internet, gaming is not her thing, she doesn’t do her stuff on twitter, she’s not posting to flickr. No, she’s learning French.
Ironically, for one so opposed to the skill of ‘using a computer’ my mum has an insatiable desire to learn, and in her retirement, she’s decided to unleash her brain on French. All cool. Her course pointed her at some online resources and the computer she got me to sort for her a few years ago* started to actually get used.
She’s got to the stage where she can reasonably get along with OS X. YAY! Only no. Because she has arthritis, and it turns out, using the mouse is double-plus painful. So I thought ‘ahhh, iPad’. Only 300 quidlings is a lot of money for my mum.
After some consideration I thought, well, why don’t I get a cheap Android tablet and see if she gets on okay with that. It might work for her, and if not, I’ll cope with having more tech around the house :)
My first impressions of the SuperPad II were pretty good, it’s not exactly fast, but it’s acceptable. It’s got a fair-but-definately-not-great screen. The build quality’s about what you’d expect, but from a distance it looks respectableish. Indeed if you put it in a line with the Apple stuff in dim light it kinda looks like a slightly stretched iPad.
It’s based around an ARM 6x series processor, so it’s not exactly storming along, but for a bit of webbrowsing, the odd bit of Flash (the main plus point afaic is the presence of Flash, alledgedly) it should be okay, I reckoned. And Android. It’s not based around some back-street-China operating system (like my old niPod, which was frankly, unusable). It’s a real, supported OS….err, yeah. More on that in a sec.
So, out of the box, plugged in and fired it up. Makes an Android plunk (having briefly displayed the cute Linux penguin) and, up came a fairly nice looking screen. Yeah, the quality as I said isn’t vaguely near that of the iPad/iPad II or probably any of the posher Android tablets, but it’s okay. The resistive touch screen took some getting used to, and then I remembered my old iPaq. Tilting my finger so as my nail became the pointer made things much better.
I’ve not used Android before so it took a while before I got used to the navigation on it, and yeah, I’m used to the Apple way, so I’m not going to say I’m converted, but it’s fine. What I totally didn’t expect was encountering ‘unsupported device’. I suppose this comes from me being a naive, but I assumed that if you had an Android app, and it required say a mic, a camera, and a screen that, well, any Android based machine would run it.
It seems this is not the case; hell, some apps even have it down on a per-specific-item basis.
Surely that’s insanity.
I suppose I’ve been spoilt, pretty much everything in OS X will run on a G3 up to an IntelMac. Just more slowly. I get the ‘you don’t have a new enough OS’. That I’d be more inclined to happily deal with. So my tablet’s running Android 2.2 and you need 2.3. Fine. Okay.
But I don’t get the device incompatibility. I could get ‘Your processor isn’t fast enough to run this’, as an error. But just ‘no you can’t, because yours is off-brand’.
Apart from that, Flash is poor and tends to crash it. Opera on it, however, is quite nice (no Flash though). And for some reason, the Youtube app won’t install either – despite it being advertised with it :-/
Ah well. We’ll see if my mum can use it, if not, then never mind it’s a handy little tablet for the odd bit of light browsing. Certainly don’t begrudge it it’s cost.
* It’s a Hackintosh with no sound, because I couldn’t make the sound keep working.
