The $20 Android tablet

[rollei]

I didn't realize Android let us store apps on an external card now.

I want to store free, no-ads apps on an external card as a backup because if they changed their mind and start putting ads on the apps, I still have the copy without ads. This will be useful when I buy a new device.

[Hiall]

I bought the promotional $20 Azpen A727, my first tablet. Had a problem and found this forum. On 06-12-2014 DMcCunney wrote that: the screen is slightly stretched and the aspect ratio is off! I placed a portrait photo on it and when I view it horizontally the face is too wide, when viewed vertically it is much too thin. Neither looks remotely correct. Has anyone found a fix?

[Hiall]

Hi! I have a $20AzpenA727 photo annoyance. A photo will not move from horizontal to vertical when the tablet is turned without my pressing the unneeded editing button which displays a series of edit photos. At that point it won’t swipe. Have other people had that problem? Is there a fix?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by rollei

I didn't realize Android let us store apps on an external card now.

That depends on what you mean by "store". You can place the apk file that is the Android program on an external card and store a copy there. You cannot run the program from the card on a stock android device. You must have a rooted device and do the things I mentioned earlier in the thread.

I want to store free, no-ads apps on an external card as a backup because if they changed their mind and start putting ads on the apps, I still have the copy without ads. This will be useful when I buy a new device.

I stash copies of stuff like that on my Google Drive. I have the Drive app on my device, and when I access the copy on my Drive, it downloads and offers to install it.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hiall

I bought the promotional $20 Azpen A727, my first tablet. Had a problem and found this forum. On 06-12-2014 DMcCunney wrote that: the screen is slightly stretched and the aspect ratio is off! I placed a portrait photo on it and when I view it horizontally the face is too wide, when viewed vertically it is much too thin. Neither looks remotely correct. Has anyone found a fix?

Didn't we discuss this before?

What viewer are you using to display other photo? Maintianing aspect ratio is a viewer app issue.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hiall

Hi! I have a $20AzpenA727 photo annoyance. A photo will not move from horizontal to vertical when the tablet is turned without my pressing the unneeded editing button which displays a series of edit photos. At that point it won’t swipe. Have other people had that problem? Is there a fix?

The tablet is supposed to switch between portrait and landscape mode when you change the orientation of the device. Does it do that for other things?

My A727 developed an issue where it no longer auto-rotated. This appears to be a failure in the sensor hardware that detects what orientation the device is in. It was not a disaster for me because I found an app tnhat will let me force a desired orientation by app. My eBook viewer, for example, I always want in portrait mode, but the spreadsheet app should always be landscape. I don't do a lot of image viewing, so that's not a concern.

I subsequently got an Azpen A741, which is the same form factor as the A727, but has a quad core processor and 8GB of flash, alone with a high res 1024x600 screen. Retail price was $50, and I had a $20 off coupon from MicroCenter. Thus far, it's mostly behaving. The main quirks are a tendency to drop Wifi, and a tendency to reboot for no reason I can track down. (It does not do so while in an application, but if turned off while sitting at the launcher screen and left for a while, it may reboot when trying to turn it back on.
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Dennis

[Student549]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

{Quoting from #11 in this thread.}

And as far as I can tell, I have now successfully rooted the device.

This was somewhat more complex than might have been. The first required step was to install the Google Android USB driver to be able to establish communication with the tablet from Windows. On the tablet end, that required turning on USB debugging, which was non-intuitive. To do it, you had to go to Settings/About Tablet, scroll down to Build Number, and tap it multiple times. you would get progress messages, and finally be told you were a Developer, which puts a Developer Options menu choice in Settings where you can turn on USB Debugging mode.

Getting the Google USB driver installed was another matter. Getting the driver requires downloading 520MB of Google Android SDK, installing it, and running the SDK Manager to get the driver. Once you have the driver, you can connect the table to Windows via the supplied USB cable, and have Windows install the driver. The problem is that operation failed from the XP machine I originally tried from. XP complained it couldn't find the software, even though driver, inf file and supporting files were in the location I pointed to.

As I suspected, this was a Windows issue. I downloaded the 64 bit version of the Android SDK and put it on the SO's 64bit Win7 laptop. The driver successfully installed there.

<snip>
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Dennis

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. Your comment "The driver successfully installed there." was not so easy for me, so I am filling in some details for others.

I had been 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. Perhaps 5.1 firmware for a later model of an Azpen device could be used, but probably not. They don't seem to make their firmware available, at least not on azpenpc.com. Maybe someone has this somewhere? Azpen pointed me to an upgrade tool at
http://www.mediafire.com/file/cx3ob4...+Allwinner.rar
but I haven't explored this yet.

Now here's my contribution to your thread: installing the USB driver on the Windows 7 side.

I started at https://developer.android.com/develop/index.html
When I installed Android Studio bundle 2.2.3 (i.e., with SDK) on my Win7 desktop, it put it into
/Users/<myname>/AppData which is normally hidden from view. If you double click the dropdown with the location starting in /Users/<myname>, it will switch to a long string {which you can later copy with CTRL-C for pasting (CTRL-V) into the Device Manager Driver installation box used below}, and you can add "AppData" to force the once hidden directory to appear. Drilling down below that, the driver that the device manager wants finally shows up in
<Drive>:\Users\<myname>\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\ extras\google\usb_driver

But the first time I tried this, the proper KitKat driver simply wasn't there!
---

SO I HAD TO GO BACK INTO THE STUDIO's
TOOLS-ANDROID- SDK MANAGER
first, and under the tab "SDK Platforms" clicked on Android 4.4 to install the missing package.

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!}

---

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
tried to give 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.}

But that didn't work. I had to use the second option, "Let me pick from a list of device drivers..." and chose Show all devices. Then I could select the button "Have Disk" and at that point I was able to enter the pathname for the desired directory. The file I was looking for was "android_winusb.inf"

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

Android ADB Interface
Android Bootloader Interface
Android Composite ADB Interface


I chose "Android ADB Interface", which seemed appropriate. Microsoft read me the Riot Act, "Installing this device drive is not recommended..." so I figured I was on the right track! In device Driver, I now have an "Android Device" instead of an "Other devices", and that shows "This device is working properly."

Ta-da!

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.



I copied all the files on the internal chip to my hard drive, for safekeeping.

Again, thanks for starting this thread. Now I'm on to rooting this.

Please note: under Azpen's Settings/Backups and reset, there is an option for Recovery Mode with a note about "system upgrade", but I have yet to explore that, now that I am talking via USB...

And I understand Paul Laughton as written a BASIC for android....
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...fo.basic&hl=en

Read some ancient history at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_BASIC
and look for Paul's name there. <Sigh!> Hardware was SO much simpler back then.....

Daniel

[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.
______
Dennis

[Student549]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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.

<snip>

So I guess that you trust the Kingo Root app to be free from malware...
But I don't have the code for "su", so I guess I'm stuck using it.

My guess is the one {driver} you chose was appropriate for what you wanted to do, which is communicate with the device when developing.

Well, I wasn't intending to develop; I didn't have much to go on when looking for a USB driver.... I just wanted to get a Win7 driver that actually talks to the device. And yes, I also had to enable USB debugging on the Azpen side. The composite driver did NOT work. I didn't try the bootloader driver.

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.


<snip> I'm less concerned with practicing Safe Hex.
______
Dennis

"Safe Hex". That's cute....hadn't heard that one. As I said, I also enabled "USB debugging" on the tablet side.

I downloaded the Azpen "upgrade tool for allwinner" and found the app was written in Chinese. I translated the table of contents from the .rar'd .pdf file:

Installation of mass production software . . .2
1.1 Installation . . . .·2
1.2 Program location . . . . 4
2. Run Production Software . . . 4
2.1 Running mass production software . . . 4
2.2 File Selection . . . . 5
2.3 Starting Mass Production . . . . 6
2.4 Attention . . . . 6
3. Device programming . . . · · · 6
3.1. Mass production using PC USB port . . . 6
3.2. Mass production with USB Hub . . .·9
3.3 Determining the Upgrade Status of the Device . . . 10
3.3.1 Successful Programming . . . 10
3.3.2 Programming Failure . . . 10
4. Precautions. . . 11
4.1 Inserting the device .· . . 11
4.2 Unplugging the device . . . .· 11
5. Stop mass production software . . . 12
Appendix: Frequently Asked Questions and Handling Methods of Programming Failure .·

So it looks like you have to have the firmware image; the tool doesn't help you with that..... I won't bother to install it.

I wrote to the Azpen support email and got a quick reply.

Here is what they said:

We are currently updating the website so we should be adding a few other firmware images to the site soon. That said, I am not sure when there will be an upgrade image available (to go from 4.4 Kit Kat to 5.1 Lollipop) as newer Android versions require a little bit more RAM to run optimally.

Sounds like your HP Slate is another worthy toy. I see you have another thread started for that.

Best regards,
Daniel

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Student549

So I guess that you trust the Kingo Root app to be free from malware...
But I don't have the code for "su", so I guess I'm stuck using it.

It's a widely used tool, and doesn't deploy malware.

It is more annoying than it used to be. The current version roots the device, and pushes a Superuser app to device. The Superuser app serves as a root request broker. When an app requests root access, it pops up a dialog box stating it, and asks permission to grant it. If you say yes, the permission is granted and the app will get it again in the future. The Superuser app maintains the list, and you can go in at any time and remove root permissions for an app. (And if you have something like Jack Palevich's Terminal Emulator installed, you can enter su at a command line and get a # prompt. )

I actually prefer Chainfire's SuperSu app for this, and installed it, but the one Kingo provides works.

Unfortunately, Kingo also pushes a Smart Battery app I didn't want, and an Alibaba shopping app. Fortunately, both can be uninstalled with the standard Add/Remove routines, but getting them was an unpleasant surprise.

There are other one-click-root solutions. I used Kingo because it was known to work, and had successfully rooted other Azpen models. (They have an app version that attempts to root on the device. A friend was able to use it to root one of the bigger Azpen models. Using the Kingo app from Windows wasn't an option because he's all Linux, and the rooting solutions done via USB connection assume a Windows host.)

Well, I wasn't intending to develop; I didn't have much to go on when looking for a USB driver.... I just wanted to get a Win7 driver that actually talks to the device. And yes, I also had to enable USB debugging on the Azpen side. The composite driver did NOT work. I didn't try the bootloader driver.

What you chose seems to have done what you needed.

"Safe Hex". That's cute....hadn't heard that one.

It's ancient as such terms go. I've been in computers on the IT side for over 30 years, and it dates back that far. It was coined before the Internet Ate the World, and the normal form of communication with the outside was a dial up modem calling a BBS.

As I said, I also enabled "USB debugging" on the tablet side.

Whether you need to depends on what you are doing, but as mentioned, you can generally do it without it getting in the way when you connect via USB for other reasons.

I downloaded the Azpen "upgrade tool for allwinner" and found the app was written in Chinese. I translated the table of contents from the .rar'd .pdf file:

No surprise.

I believe Azpen is technically a Korean outfit, but they OEM their hardware from Yet Another Chinese Consumer Electronics Manufacturer you've never heard of.

So it looks like you have to have the firmware image; the tool doesn't help you with that..... I won't bother to install it.

I wrote to the Azpen support email and got a quick reply.

Here is what they said:

No surprise again.

And they're right about RAM.

The original A727 I bought had 512MB RAM and 4GB flash. It was bought to be an eBook viewer and a cheap way to learn about Android. Anything it could do beyond view eBooks was a fringe benefit. As it happened, there was a fair bit it could do, especially after rooting, and I didn't find the 512MB RAM a serious limitation.

The A746 has 1GB RAM and 8GB flash, which was a step up, but retained the low res 800x480 screen. That was not a show stopper for my use case.

But Azpen is very much "design to cost", and things like no Bluetooth (which I didn't care about) were examples. The chips to provide it add to cost, and the intended uses don't require them, so...

You got the HD model, which has higher res display equivalent to my HP Slate, but I note it has 512MB RAM. Costs, again, and they halved the RAM to up the screen resolution without boosting costs.

It likely works well enough, but probably would struggle to run newer Android releases.

Sounds like your HP Slate is another worthy toy. I see you have another thread started for that.

Yep.

It's out of stock currently, but was in stock for a bit at $40. I'm keeping an eye out. If it appears again at that price, I want a spare, and one as an alternative to my SO's B&N Nook tablet.
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Dennis