Android tablets

I’ve been wanting (drooling) over Android tablets for awhile now.  Almost bought one several time over Christmas holiday, but managed to stop myself in time.  Knowing that new (dual core Tegra and Android 3.0) things was coming help convinced me to wait for things to settle down before diving in.

In the meantime, I’ve been educating myself as much as possible about Android, phones and tablets.  I did exchanged my two plus years old RIM Blackberry for a Droid 2 Global.  That helped me get familiar with Android, its Markets, apps, rooting, etc 🙂  It took some getting used to with the way Android apps and phone work.  I’ve been so used to my Berry (it’s perfect for email, text) that I almost swap my Droid phone back for the Berry!!!!  I’ll have to say that RIM has done a great job with making their phones work seamlessly in the mobile email environment.  It was painless to get mail from my various accounts – Gmail, Yahoo, IMAPS hosted on my personal server at home, etc.  Also love the way I can customize how I get notified (alerts) when different type of email come in.  Oh my god!  The way I can customize it is just so awesome and easy to setup and use!

Anyway, sorry, back to Android tablets.  I almost bought the Velocity Cruz (T103, T105, T301 and Cruz Reader) several times, and glad I did not.  Stay away from the Cruz and any other tablets that are not based on ARM chips.  The Cruz tablets are based on MIPS architecture and you will have a hard time finding community support.  There are some hacking on the Cruz, but most of the Android hacking community is focused on ARMs and a minority on x86.

This is because Android was first released for the ARM architecture, with the development and emulation done on x86 (build and toolchains were done on Ubuntu x86 Linux at Google).  So there are lots of supports and knowledge out there for those two architecture.

Sooooo…. there was a sale for the Viewsonic G Tablet, and it was at the right time (weak moment) and I bought one.  Heh.  Anyway, so far I am happy with it, only had it for 4 days.  Got an AOSP 2.3.4 build running on it.  I’ve pulled down CM source repo and am going to build my own.

More to post soon.