So, I have so far failed in my quest to lay my hands on a Slim Devices slimp3 (or any of the later Squeezebox with a VFD display). And so it has come to pass that I have spent a few (literally £3) on a new microSD card with which will allow me (hopefully) to put new firmware on the crappy Superpad 2. My initial impressions of the Superpad were that it was limited by Android. It is. Android 2.2 (I thought it ran 2.0, but it’s 2.2) is just not very exciting. Also, Android has the irritation of applications that are installable only on specific devices (despite not apparently using specific features of those devices). It’s also limited because it can only install free, not paid applications. All of this makes it a bit crap.
The touch screen (resistive, not capacitive) is somewhat vague, meaning that misclicks are a bit of a common occurrence (believe me, I’ve recalibrated the ass of it, trying to coax it to work more reliably). And the screen, whilst an adequate resolution, is not the nicest display. It’s got a bit of a light streak in one corner, and is not hugely bright.
Despite all this, the audio decoder hardware is actually somewhat better than that on the Viewsonic box.
And it means you don’t have to have the telly on to listen to music, although it will require more finicking with the setup of mediatomb (the slimp3 would have used squeezebox server, which I was playing with, with some success). Which is nice.
And so, a bit of googlefu (not really very much fu, to be honest. More like a teensy bit of googling) lead me to discover that there is a community created update for the firmware (the update firmware option on the device brings up ‘err 301’ before failing), but you have to have a microSD to achieve such a thing. So a microSD’s been ordered, and will hopefully arrive shortly.
And then shall begin the removal of audio and video media (with the exception of vinyl and shellac, which is special) from the lounge. Of course, this does make us more reliant on the media server, so perhaps I should take steps to back that up too. Thankfully, it runs linux and is thus relatively easy.
