[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Student549

Thanks for your great guidance, Dennis. I bought the 4.4 KitKat A746HD for $30, and had some trouble finding the ADB driver. So here is a drill down on that. I imagine it is similar to the A727 you wrote about, and I see you now have the A746 as well.

The A746 differs.

Rooting it was fairly simple, and was handled by Kingo Root. It was a "What I tell you three times is true" affair. I had to retry several times before Kingo reported success.

I was hoping to upgrade from KitKat 4.4 to maybe 5.1, as the MicroCenter ad mistakenly said it was running 5.1. But I haven't found suitable firmware for reflashing.

I'm not sure it exists. Azpen is one of the vendors that doesn't push Android updates for their devices. What it comes with is what you're stuck with.

This hasn't been a big deal for me, because my question is "Will the apps I want to use run under the version of Android the device has?" The answer has usually been yes.

I was given an Entourage Pocket Edge device by a friend who realized he wasn't going to make true use of it, and wanted it to go to a good home. The PE is a novel design with both an LCD and an eInk screen. It was before its time, and Entourage is no longer with us. It came with Android 1.1. Entourage engineers pushed a beta release of 2.1 Froyo out the door before Entourage went belly up. There's a (mostly inactive) PE support conference here on MR, and I was able to locate the Froyo beta to my PE (and get a rooted device in the process.) Apps were problematic, as most of what I run requires a 4.X release of Android, but I was willing to find enough things that worked under Froyo to have a usable device.

But here's my contribution to your thread:

<...>
Also, in the NEXT tab for SDK Tools, checked the checkbox at the bottom "Show Package Details" and made sure I checked under "Android SDK Build-Tools" the "obsolete" 19.1.0 driver. The Studio doesn't clutter your system up with too many assets you don't need, so you have to explicitly add them. {My long-standing frustration with computers: they do EXACTLY what you tell them to!}

"Where Is the Do What I Mean Key?"

Then I went to the desktop icon marked Computer, right-clicked it for Manage and went into the Device Manager pane and right clicked the Other Device (lacking a driver), and gave it the driver address for the <Drive>:\Users\<myname>\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\ extras\google\usb_driver directory that has recently appeared. {See CTRL-C trick mentioned above.}

When I did this, it gave me several choices of drivers to install!

I chose Android ADB Interface, which seemed appropriate. I didn't try the other two, one which included something for a bootloader, and another referred to as combined. Maybe that would have been better?

I don't know. My guess is the one you chose was appropriate for what you wanted to do, which is communicate with the device when developing.

I had been following the tutorial at
https://developer.android.com/traini...g-project.html

and --success!-- the "Hello World" first app screen showed up on the now USB-connected A746HD.

Bravo!

And thanks for the detailed explanation of what you did.

I'm not trying to develop for Android, so I don't need to do things like "adb shell" to access the device.

USB access does have quirks. On the old A727, turning on USB debugging was necessary to be able the root the device, but got in the way of things like transferring files (like eBooks) to the microSD card in the device. Kit-Kat and Lollipop have no problem with USB debugging being enabled when I wanted to transfer files, and just popped up a box asking me what I wanted to do.

The current main tablet here is another Micro Center special - a refurb HP Slate 7 4200en. I was meeting my SO and her girlfriend at Micro Center to assist the girlfriend in buying some kit. Me and Micro Center are like cats and string. I tend to see things that make me go "Oooooh! <Pounce!>"

This time, it was the HP Slate. Quad core 1.3ghz nVidia Tegra processor, 1280x800 display, 1GB RAM and 8GB flash, a microSD card capable of accepting a 64GB microSD card, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 5MP rear facing camera. Price: $50. The 8GB flash is partitioned so that 5GB is available for app storage, and I didn't need to root and jump through the hoops I mentioned in the thread to be able to store apps an and run them from the microSD card.

I have the capability, since it rooted first time with Kingo Root, but I haven't needed to actually do it. I have almost everything including the kitchen sink installed, but still have available space.

The Slate runs 4.2 Jellybean, and is stuck there. HP no longer supports this model and isn't pushing updates. I mostly don't care. I think I have two apps elsewhere that don't run under Jellybean or later and require at least Kit-Kat, but both are things I can live without.

Most of the updates tend to be security related, but not things I care about. The tablet is a local use device, and goes online infrequently. When it does, it's mostly to check for app updates. I'm less concerned with practicing Safe Hex.
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Dennis