Quote:
Originally Posted by Hrafn
But does 4.4 make any sense in a product, one of whose main selling points over the Kindle/Kobo competition is its microSD card (which 4.4 would largely nobble)? What Android versions have Rockchips released for the rk30xx/rk31xx?
Alternatively, should we be suggesting that they go no further than 4.2 (the Kepler is currently on 4.0) until Rockchips releases a newer version that handles microSD?
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4.4 makes sense as it introduced quite a few changes that includes performance enhancements, and so on. Sure, the extSD write-ability stuff was, well, not thought through properly, HOWEVER. There are quite a few fixes for that, and from the manufacturer point of view, it's as easy to fix as 1-2-3. They can literally choose to integrate the fixes into their upstream code and just roll with it, or completely disable the whole madness 4.4 introduced.
Rockchip released 4.0 through 4.4 for their RK30/31 series, and the RK3188 chipset received an unofficial bump to 5.0/5.1 - however it did not run that fine mainly because of all the proprietary 4.4 libs used.
RK3288 received 5.0 and RK3268 even got Marshmallow as far as I know. However those SoCs are not a good choice for an e-reader, as they are quite power hungry, and are aimed more at the high-end market (set top boxes, etc.).
I'm happy with the choice of Rockchip as they are a quite open platform, especially on the older models (rk30/31/32). However Rockchip's strategy to leave behind each release and only work on the latest series makes me worry.
A better choice would be to use Qcom chipsets, especially the new low-power Wear 2100 model. While our devices might not be wearables, they can certainly use the low-power parts of the chipset, and maybe even the sensors for page turning on tilt/tap.