Well, they got my attention.
There's a Midwest computer retail chain called Micro Center which is expanding. Micro Center occupies the same niche as the late Computerland, a full service brick and mortar computer retailer chain.
In particular, they just opened locations in Brooklyn and Queens in New York City. The Brooklyn location is the ground floor of one of the Bush Terminal buildings, industrial buildings that have been gradually repurposed as industry went elsewhere. The Brooklyn site is a hop, skip, and jump by subway from where I am.
A direct mail announcement of the NYC locations popped up in my mailbox a few days ago, including a coupon to get a 7" Android tablet for $20. A little Googling revealed that it's an
Azpen Innovation A727 Tablet
Azpen is one of the many Chinese device makers that have jumped into the market for budget devices. They are a partner with places like Walmart, QVC, and Micro Center that cater to the budget conscious.
The device features:
Capacitive Multi-Point Touchscreen LCD 7" 800x480 Display
Allwinner A23 1.5GHz Dual-Core CPU
512MB RAM & 4GB SSD Storage
Android 4.2 Jelly Bean
Expandable up to 32GB via microSD Card
List price is $80. The specs are mediocre, and I would not buy one at list price, but for $20, it's an impulse purchase.
It followed me home, and I kept it. I added a 16GB microSD card my SO had bought for her Nook tablet but doesn't use.
I now get to dive into the deep end of the Android software pool.
I've uninstalled a few things I didn't want, like the Games app (which turns out to be a WildTangent offering), and the trial version of Mobisystems Office Pro, an Android office suite that lets you work with MS Office files.
I make extensive use of Google offerings, so I installed their various client apps for things like Gmail, GCalendar, and Google Drive, and installed Quick Office, another office suite for Android.
I was familiar with Quick Office from Palm OS, where they had a similar product for Palm devices. I used a competitor, Dataviz's Documents to Go, which is also available for Android. It turns out Google bought Quick Office, and offers it as a free app for Android. The neat bit is that it integrates with Google Drive, and you can edit Google docs and spreadsheets stored on your Google Drive and save them locally or store them back to the drive.
I also added a task manager (since the built-in Android task manager doesn't seem to be present), Chrome and Firefox Beta as browsers, a couple of open source text editors, the RealVNC VNC client, and a 7-zip compatible archiver. SSH and FTP clients are on the list.
The primary use case for the tablet is eBook reader. I looked at a number of eBook viewer apps for Android, and what I have installed is
FBReader. FBReader is free, open source, and cross platform, and I have it installed under Windows and Linux. It views an assortment of formats, including FB2, ePub and Mobi. Since I have volumes in both ePub and Mobi I want to read on the tablet, and I
don't want to do a lot of Calibre conversions, a product that handles both was the primary requirement.
The Android version is actually a port from C to Java of the original desktop app, so some things that are in the desktop version aren't yet in the Android app. The major missing piece for me is support for Plucker documents. Plucker is an offline HTML viewer for Palm devices. I used (and still do) a Palm PDA for years, and converted thousands of HTML documents to the format Plucker uses for consumption on my PDA. Discovering the desktop version of FBReader was a boon, because it could view Plucker docs, and I could read them on something besides my PDA.
FBReader allows you to specify where it will look for books, so I added the external card, and it handily searched and found all of the volumes. Many had been exported from Calibre, where I had series data entered, and FBReader picked up the series data and displays them by series if desired. (There doesn't seem to be a way to add series data on the device - it must already exist in the metadata of books copied to the device.)
The next major step is rooting it. Several "one click rooting" solutions exist for Windows, but all are for better known and more widely distributed devices. I found rooting instructions, which require getting the Google Android SDK and installing the Android driver from it. Unfortunately, Windows won't install it. It claims it can't find the software in the directory the driver files are installed in. This appears to be a Windows issue, and next step is to try again with the 64 bit version from the SO's Win7 laptop,
Longer term, what I'd
like is a 10" Android model, with more Honest-to-Ghu RAM and a BT or USB keyboard. (The FAQ for the A727 says it can't use an external keyboard, but I suspect that may not be the case once rooted.) Meanwhile, the A727 is a handy device to learn on, and more than worth what I paid for it.
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Dennis