The PE is now at a mostly final state. There may be other things added down the road, but for the most part it has what I want. I put a copy of a current list of installed apps on my PE on my Google Drive,
here. This listing is generated by a free app called App Dragon. It doesn't show things provided as built-ins with the PE, like Docs to Go. I've added brief comments about what things are. By preference, I get open source apps, and free if there isn't an open source version. The challenge with an orphaned device like the PE is finding things that will run on it, since current Android apps mostly was a more recent version of the OS.
The primary purpose of the tablet is viewing eBooks. The PE includes the Reader app, that can display ePub and PDF files on the eInk screen, but it doesn't cover all the bases. I have files in other formats, and the Reader PDF viewer doesn't always render PDFs read-ably. (My test case is a PDF version of Northrop Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism. The default rendering to simply too small, but scaling within the PDF viewer makes navigation painful, and turning on PDF Reflow inserts line breaks in annoying places.)
My preferred eBook viewer is the open source FBReader. An older version of FBReader written in C runs under Windows and Linux. A rewrite in Java called FBReaderJ runs on Android and other Java based platforms. FBReader handles FB2 files (the default etext standard for Russian eBooks), ePub, Mobi and other things like HTML, so I largely don't care what format an eBook is in.
FBReaderJ adds optional plugins that let it display PDF, DjVu, and CBR/CBZ files from within FBReader.
I looked at several PDF viewers, including the Adobe viewer app for the PE. On my other tablets, the open source MuPDF gets the nod. It runs on the PE, but crashes trying to view my test case. The FBReader plugin does a better job than Adobe's viewer, so it gets the nod. I'll simply read PDFs from within FBReader, which is what I'd prefer to do anyway.
The challenge with an orphaned device like the PE is finding apps that run under old versions of Android. Google Play attempts to filter lists by what will run, but there may be older versions of current apps that will run but aren't available through Google Play.
My big wish list item is a replacement for the built-in Docs to Go. That works, but lacks some things I'd like. My test ase there is an Excel spreadsheet that has images embedded in some worksheets. Docs to Go's spreadsheet viewer displays the sheet, but does not display the images.
On my other tablets, I run WPS Office (formerly Kingsoft Office) as the best of the free office suite packages. It has a good feature set, and doesn't have ads. Unfortunately, WPS Office wants Android 4+, and won't run on the PE. I found an old (5.1) version of Kingsoft that
does run, but has problems rendering my test file. I gave up and uninstalled it.
I found and tried a couple of apps modified to use the eInk display on the Edge - Cool Reader and FBReader. Cool Reader seems to be Edge specific - I can't get eBooks to display fitting the smaller PE LDC screen, which causes issues trying to use the eInk display. FBReader works, but you must have the book open on the LCD side to navigate, and it simply copies what's there to the frame buffer for display on eInk. That largely eliminates the power saving features of using the eInk side. It
does let you read outdoors in sunlight, but I basically don't do that. Both went away.
Current efforts revolve around playing with alternative launchers. Elsewhere, I prefer Nova Launcher, and bought the pro version. Nova is another that won't run on the PE. Current alternatives installed for test are the ADW Launcher, the ICS Launcher (which tries to emulate Android 4.0's stock launcher) Jellybean (which tries to emulate Android 4.2's stock launcher) and Go Launcher Security, which features high configuration. So far, Go launcher looks like the best of the lot.
The next step will be using Titanium Backup to remove some of the builtins, like the Store and Upgrade apps. With Entourage out of business, there is no Store or Upgrades to access, so why keep them?
A known issue with Ermine is that it broke the ability to move apps to the internal SD card. As noted elsewhere, that's done using a built-in app called apps2sd. But whether an app
can be moved to the internal card depends on how it was designed. The app must be set up by the developer to permit that to be done, and not all are. And even if you do, the
entire app is not moved. The portion that
can reside on SD is relocated, but the core remains in device storage.
On the Edge, a work around if you have a rooted device is Likn2SD. To use it, you need an external microSD card, and you must partition it to carve out a linux file system on a partition. Insert the partitioned card in the device, reboot, and Android will see and mount the Linux file system.
Link2SD can take apps you have installed and move the entire app to the file system on the card, and place a symlink in the root file system pointing to the new location. Android follows the symlink and runs the app from the card. (Link2SD isn't the only such solution - there is an open source package called mount2sd that does similar things.) You must be rooted to do this because Link2SD must place entries in the root file system to have things work.
I use Link2SD elsewhere, on a tablet with a whopping 787MB of app storage. I carved out a 2GB ext4 partition on a 32GB card and installed Link2SD. At this point, everything
including the kitchen sink is installed on the device, and the device still thinks I have over 300MB of free app storage.
Link2SD works on the PE, but I may not bother. You use it because you need more free app storage space, but thus far I've been able to install everything without bumping into "out of app storage" limits, so there's no current point to running it.
There are some things on the PE that were installed by the Ermine + gapps upgrade that might go away. I don't tweet, for example, and make next to no use of Facebook, so I don't see reason to keep them.
It's been a fun trip.
______
Dennis