I recently got an Android tablet. Midwestern computer retailer MicroCenter is expanding, and they opened locations in Brooklyn and Queens in NYC. A grand opening promotional flyer turned up in my mailbox, with a coupon for a 7" Android tablet for $20. The Brooklyn location is a subway ride away for me.
The device is an Azpen A727, running Android 4.2 Jellybean. Azpen is Yet Another Chinese Consumer Electronics Manufacturer targeting the budget market, and MicroCenter is a channel partner. The specs are low end - 7" 800x480 screen, dual-core 1.5ghz ARM Cortex 7 CPU, 512MB RAM and 4GB internal flash storage, but for $20 it was a no brainer impulse purchase. I viewed it as a teaching device to learn more about Android, and be better positioned for the sort of unit I want down the road. I plugged in a 16GB microSD card (recently replaced by a 32GB card) and started fiddling
The primary use case was eBook viewer, and it's just dandy for that. I use the open source
FBReaderJ program as the viewer. I use FBReader under Windows and Linux as an eBook viewer, because it handle ePub, Mobi, FB2, and (in a particular win for me) Plucker files, so I can read the thousands I accumulated on something other than my Palm PDA. The Android version is a port from C to Java. I doesn't handle Plucker files, but does do both ePub and Mobi, so I'm spared the need to do Calibre conversions to read stuff.
FBReaderJ offers considerable control over how things are displayed, with selectable fonts, font sizes, line spacing and margins, so getting a readable display was no problem. There's an image view mode activated by a long press on the image, that lets you view the image stand alone and expand, contract, and pan via gesture.
Books are selectable by author's name, title, tag, or series, with a user configurable Favorites list, and a Recently Viewed list. (My one wish is a Recently Added list.)
There are about 7GB worth of books on the SD, with MobileRead editions in abundance. :-) (I am extravagantly fond of the work
pynch has been doing. The illustrated Shakespeare, Complete James Joyce and Complete Virginia Woolf collections are treasures.)
But since it is a general purpose tablet, I've been exploring what else it will do. I use Gmail as my primary email account, and am active on Google+, so the Google apps for Android got added. I'm also making increasing use of Google Docs and Sheets and keep an assortment of things on Google Drive, so the Drive, Docs and Sheets apps went on.
I wanted a text editor, and the open source a920 editor, with tabs and syntax highlighting fills the bill. I also wanted some form of office suite, and originally installed Quick Office. I knew of that from Palm OS, but hadn't known Google bought them and had a free Android version.
The big missing piece was a keyboard. The device FAQ says an external keyboard can't be used. I suspected that was a software restriction in the stock image, that would be lifted by rooting the device. I was correct. The tablet recognized a keyboard was connected, and a Logitech entry appeared in Settings with the option to select a keyboard layout.
They keyboard I'm using is a standard USB keyboard, and the tablet has a microUSB port, so I got a USB->microUSB adapter to let plug it in. After I confirmed the keyboard worked, I got curious. I have a miniature Belkin 4 port USB hub. So I plugged the hub into the adapter, ands plugged the keyboard and a USB mouse into the hub. The tablet saw the mouse, too, and the mouse could be used to do things instead of screen touches.
Firefox gets the nod as browser, with a beta Java version of the VLC media player I use on Windows and Linux for video and audio.
I've had to be fairly ruthless about what I install. while I have a 32GB expansion card, programs can't live there. Applications must be installed to internal storage, which is limited to 767MB. Some apps can be partially moved to an internal 1GB partition seen as SDCARD. Unfortunately, none of the Google apps can. Chrome got uninstalled because it was simply too big. Applications would fail to update because there was insufficient internal storage to do it. Google Earth went away to save space because I wasn't likely to really use it. Quick Office went away because it's now deprecated, and Google prefers you use their Docs and Sheets apps instead. I did for a while, but they've gone way too. I recently installed a free office suite called Kingston Office that seems toi have the basic features I need, and can load from and save to Dropbox and Google Drive. Files to be edited get stored as a local copy, which is good, as I'm not always connected.
Battery life is acceptable. The big drains are screen brightness and wifi, I find the screen perfectly readable with brightness dialed back to about 1/3 of full brightness, and I installed a widget to toggle wifi on and off with a touch, and keep it off unless I specifically need to connect.
What I want down the road is a larger unit with 10" screen, more RAM, and
much more application storage space, but in the mean time, what I have has been quite useful, and is certainly worth what I paid for it.
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Dennis