Quote:
Originally Posted by MajorDizaster
I made the purchase today. As others, I couldn't pass up the deal to kick the tires on Android without worrying about borking a $300+ investment.
|
That was roughly my thought. As mentioned above, the primary use case of eBook viewer more than justified the price. All else was gravy.
Quote:
|
Anyhow, I read a review on the Microcenter site that stated "you can not put apps on the expandable microSD". I am too new to Android to know how to do this, but was wondering if this really was the case. Can some one confirm? Also, what about if it is rooted?
|
The review is correct.
I haven't been able to put apps on the external SD card, and my device
is rooted. (I don't believe
any Android device will let you install apps to an external card and run them from it, but I could be mistaken.)
The big issue with the A727 is limited application storage space. It has 787MB, total, and thus far I haven't found a way to expand it. The device has 512MB RAM, and 4GB of internal flash. The flash is partitioned, with 787MB seen as app storage, and another 1GB seen as SDCARD.
Some applications can be partially moved to SDCARD, and some cannot. In particular, all of Google's apps must live in app storage and cannot be moved to the internal card. I had to drop a few Google apps to have space for other things.
Expanding app storage would require altering the device partition table to expand that partition. This far, I haven't found a way to do it.
What you
can do with an external card is store
data. For instance, it's where my eBook collection resides, as well as videos and audio files. Apps which use that data can be told to look there. The internal card is seen as /mnt/sdcard, and the external card, if installed, is seen as /mnt/extsd.
There is an app on the Play Store called Folder Mount that lets you fiddle with mount points on a rooted device, but it's intended for
data normally stored in device flash that you would like to place on the card instead. It lets you swap mount points, so the card directory where you want the data to live is seen instead of the internal flash directory the app defaults to using. Thus far, I don't have anything that stores enough data in internal flash to make use of Folder Mount necessary, though that may change down the road.
Rooting the A727 is tricky, because it's not a well known device, and the usual "one click root" solutions don't know about it. There's a guide I followed to rooting the device
here. I had the get the 64 bit version of the SDK and install the mentioned drivers from the SO's Win7 laptop. The 32 bit version would not work trying to install the drivers from XP. (XP said it couldn't find the software.)
The FAQ portion of the User Guide provided with the device says you can't use an external keyboard. That's
not true for a rooted device, and my Logitech Portable keyboard was recognized and worked, with a Logitech section appearing in Settings to select the preferred keyboard layout. For that matter, a mouse works too. See my earlier posts in this thread for details.
Feel free to post questions as you proceed.
______
Dennis