New Pocket Edge owner, with a question or two

[DMcCunney]

I am now the proud owner of a Pocket Edge. It's a pass along from a friend who got one to play with, and used it a bit doing things like taking notes at conferences. But he has an iPhone and an iPad, and realized he'd just never get enough Round Tuits to come up the learning curve on Andriod. (He's a systems guy doing devops for a startup, and busy.) He knows I've been swimming in the Android pool for a while, and decided I'd be a good home for the PE.

It's a nifty little device with neat features and rough edges, and I've been playing a bit to see what all it will do. Mine is the black model, with Model number edgejr, Firmware version 1.6, Kernel version 2.6.29 buildmaster@xeke #17, and Build number DINGO-1.13.

I've been gradually going through the accumulated post in the Edge forums, but do have a question or two.

I'm not an Android novice. I have two rooted Android tablets from a different manufacturer. I've been a computer guy for decades, starting on mainframes and working across and down. Most recently I've been a Solaris and Linux admin among other things, so I have some notion of how the pieces fit together.

I note that there have been beta ports of Ermine to bring the PE to Android 2.2 level, and there seem to be several different ones mentioned in the Edge forum. Is there a consensus on which to use? And must it be rooted to do it?

I'm interested in rooting the PE, and downloaded and installed the z4root package mentioned in the forums. z4root runs, but pops up the screen saying Debug must be on. I can go to the Settings screen where that is controlled, and enter the debug password mentioned in the forums, but nothing happens. From what I read in the forums, z4root shouldn't require Debug on or pop up that screen. Is there a specifc z4root version required? I installed the latest. Failing that, is there another rooting method known to work, or another Debug password I might try?

The biggest purpose in life for the device will be eBook viewer. The built-in Reader app does ePub and PDF. On my other tablets, I use FBReaderJ, which handles Mobi and and assortment of other things as well. I saw someone on the Entourage forum mention a version of Cool Reader that would run on the Edge and be set to display on the eInk screen, and can't find the post. Can someone provide a pointer if it exists? The one I installed runs fine on the LCD side but has no option to display on the eInk side.

Thanks in advance for assistance, and thanks for all of the hard work and information folks have already done and provided.
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Dennis

[Filark]

Welcome!

I think you'll enjoy your PE. The answers to your questions are in this forum, it's just a matter of finding them. Ermine is solid and yes there is a consensus. I'll dig through and find it for you if no one else answers. Sorry I can't do it right this minute, but I wanted to at least say hello.

More later . . . .

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Filark

Welcome!

Thank you, and thanks for responding.

I think you'll enjoy your PE. The answers to your questions are in this forum, it's just a matter of finding them.

It's the finding them that presents a challenge. When there are as many posts in a forum as the Entourage has accumulated, going through them all takes a bit. I still intend to do so, but wanted to get a couple of important ones out of the way.

Ermine is solid and yes there is a consensus. I'll dig through and find it for you if no one else answers.

Since there seem to be several different zips floating around packaging Ermine, the base question is "Which is best and where do I get it?"

What I'm likely to use at the moment is one from a package created by a Forum poster who put zips for Ermine and Dingo together in one archive, to provide a means of going back if the Ermine upgrade had a problem.

Sorry I can't do it right this minute, but I wanted to at least say hello.

More later . . . .

That's fine, and thanks.

Thus far, the question that appears to be answered is whether you need root to install Ermine, and the answer appears to be no.

I do want to root it eventually, but the two methods I saw mentioned thus far won't work here: z4root fails, and the PW used to put the device in Debug mode may work on the EE but fails on the PE. (And I'd prefer to avoid having to DL the Android SDK and use adb from the PC side. Did that for a different tablet, just to get the Android driver, and would rather not go through the exercise again.)

It's a neat little device, and I've been having fun. Biggest issue here is poor battery life. Wifi and Bluetooth are both off, and screen brightness is dialed back as far as it can be, but if it's powered on with case closed and left overnight, I need to hang it on the charger in the morning, as it's almost drained. Some comments in the forum indicate Ermine is better about that. That will be splendid if so.

An annoyance no one here can do anything about is finding apps that run on the PE. It doesn't (yet) have access to Google Play. There are various places you can DL apks and side-load, but they don't necessarily state the minimum Android version required for something to run. DL, side-load, try to install, fail, go on to next candidate...

Fun, for suitable values of the term.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Answering a couple of my own earlier questions:

Someone had mentioned a modified version of CoolReader that could be set to display on the eInk screen. That was MR user sunlifeng, but his build seems specific to the EE. (It refuses to install on the PE.)

MR user Javese contributed a build of FBReaderJ that can display on the eInk screen of the PE, incorporating the EdgeFB class from MR user vldmir. That's lovely, since I prefer FBReader and use it elsewhere.

Alas, it requires a rooted device, to be able to write to the frame buffer, and z4root fails on my PE. (FBReaderEdge won't install, either, which is likely a consequence of not being on Ermine.)

I'm still at the stock 1.6 Dingo firmware level. It's possible z4root needs 2.2 Ermine to work as expected, or I need a different z4root version.

Apparently, using either eats battery. I don't care that hard, because battery life on the PE is nothing to write home about to begin with. I can take the PE fully charged, open a book on the eInk screen in Reader, close it to blank the LCD screen and read, and the battery still drains perceptibly.

eInk requires no power to retain a page once painted on screen, which accounts for good battery life, but does need it to paint a new page. I read quite quickly. Speed is dependent on material, so complex non-fiction will go more slowly, but for the average novel, I can generally read a page on the eInk side in 5 or 10 seconds, and press the button to get a new page. (My SO reads about twice as fast as I do, and reported watching power drain while trying out an eInk device for that reason.)

I'll settle for using my preferred reader and being able to read outdoors in sunlight.

All I have to do is root the PE...
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Dennis

[Gunnerp245]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I am now the proud owner of a Pocket Edge.
Dennis

Everything is in this thread all 256 responses; "Development -=Pocket Edge ONLY=- Golden Allmine update, please test!" https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...hlight=allmine.

My advice: Ensure you have the correct files for the device attempting to upgrade,
as the EE files will brick the PE and PE files will brick the EE!

Read the whole thread; then read it again to ensure understanding;
then print the applicable information before attempting the upgrade.

Allmine RC3 was the last user upgrade.

"Perform the upgrade at your own risk."

Good luck!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gunnerp245

Everything is in this thread all 256 responses; "Development -=Pocket Edge ONLY=- Golden Allmine update, please test!" https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...hlight=allmine.

My advice: Ensure you have the correct files for the device attempting to upgrade,
as the EE files will brick the PE and PE files will brick the EE!

I have the correct files, and already read extensive commentary on what happens if you use the wrong ones...

Read the whole thread; then read it again to ensure understanding;
then print the applicable information before attempting the upgrade.

This will not be the first time I've done this sort of thing. I am proceeding slowly and very carefully.

Allmine RC3 was the last user upgrade.

"Perform the upgrade at your own risk."

The relationship between Ermine and Allmine was a point of confusion. To clarify, I want the PE files for Allmine RC3 to do the Dingo->Ermine upgrade? (It wasn't clear whether Allmine was applied after Ermine was in place or contained everything.)

Good luck!

I don't expect insuperable issues. Thanks for chiming in.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

As mentioned earlier, z4root fails on my PE. It pops up a screen saying Debug mode must be on, but the Debug PW given elsewhere seems to be specific to the EE and does nothing on my device.

I found a program called Universal Androot that runs on device, and it claims to have successfully rooted the PE. Unfortunately, the machine hangs and requires a pinhole reset when trying to actually do anything afterward. (I chose temporary root that goes away after a reboot as a precaution.) I used v1.62 beta 5.

Has anyone else tried this program with a PE and had success?

Update: Just temporarily rooted again to test something, and this time, no issues with hanging. I have no idea what's going on. Holding off on permanent root till after upgrading to Ermine.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

I am now running a rooted Pocket Edge with Android 2.2 Ermine. Woot!

I installed from the Golden Allmine RC3 update, with the additional Gapps archive mentioned here. The upgrade process was fairly painless.

I haven't tried to access the Play Store yet, but it's not pressing. Upgrade to Ermine permitted an assortment of apks I had available for side-loading, and a good bit of the stuff I wanted on the PE now is. My main use case for the device is eBook viewer, with secondary uses being productivity stuff like docs and spreadsheets that will be stored locally on device. I'm not online all that much on my other tablets, and don't see changing that with the PE.

There is still a quirk or two. One desire was to display books on the eInk side from an eBook viewer other than the built-in reader app. Modified versions of Cool Reader and FBReaderJ were mentioned here, and I found and installed both.

CoolReader runs just fine, but provides no option to display on eInk. It's possible the file I installed wasn't the correct one.

FBReader runs, asks for SuperUser permissions (which I grant), and will successfully load and display an eBook from my microSD card. But while the cover of the book appears on the eInk screen, the rest does not. Pressing the forward or back buttons on the eInk side gives me the next or previous page of the book I was reading in the Reader app before I loaded a volume with FBReaderJ. I have no idea what is going on, though pilot error is always a possibility.

I'll poke at it some more, and post a list of what I'm running and why when the configuration stabilizes.

Thanks to the various posters whose work made this possible.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

The update of the Pocket Edge went smoothly, but produced a quirk.

The upgraded device pretends it's a Google Nexus one for the outside worlds. This confuses Google Play which has an inaccurate notion of what it is, and hoses the built-in Docs to Go office suite. Try to do anything, and it says "Unsupported device passion"

It seems passion is the model name for the Nexus device the Edge is pretending to be.

Posts elsewhere in the Entourage forum mentioned the build-prop file where a lot of this stuff is specified. You have to have a rooted device to be able to diddle it, since it's in a system folder, but the result of doing the Ermine update produces one. A quick change in an editor (the open source 920 editor), with a couple of other tweaks while I was at it, save, and reboot.

Problem solved and Docs to Go works again.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Well, things were going well. I had the PE updated to become a rooted device running Android 2.2 Ermine, and was gradually installing a subset of the software on my other tablets that will run under 2.2.

Today it pulled a new surprise. Suddenly, the eInk screen no longer works. If I power cycle or pinhole reset, I'll see the eInk display clear, and as power up continues, display the "Pocket eDGe Initializing..." screen, but that's as far as eInk gets. I can't get content to display on it, and attempting to use the Reader Calibration tool in Settings had no effect.

A possibly related issue is that content in my Library mysteriously disappeared, and tapping Library tells me nothing is there. When I attempt to add an eBook from external storage, the Converting step never completes and I must cancel the operation. (By preference, I get ePub files, which Reader supports, so it isn't clear what conversion is doing.)

I don't think it's a hardware problem. If it were, I'd expect nothing to happen on the eInk display at all. But what the problem is is quite beyond me at this point.

I may be looking at starting over from scratch on the Ermine upgrade process.

(One more quirk: the device is inconsistent about recognizing the microSD card I have in it. Boot it and it thinks there's a blank card. Pop the card and reinsert and suddenly it recognizes there is a file system and content.

The card is a 32GB card from a failed tablet, formatted FAT32. What might be an issue is that it's partitioned: I used Link2SD on that tablet to store apps on the external card. That required carving out a partition with a Linux file system, and there's a 2GB+ file system formatted ext4. I believe the Linux kernel used by the Edge dates from before ext4 existed, and it may be getting confused. I can't see the ext4 slice from the Edge.)
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

I bit the bullet and re-flashed the PE from the Golden Ermine RC3 files. As I pretty much expected, that cured the eInk screen issues. Apparently something I installed gave the device heartburn.

Now to rebuild my configuration, and think twice about each choice to avoid a potential repeat of the issue.
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Dennis
Oh, no! Not another Learning Experience...

[Filark]

Sounds like you have it pretty much all figured out!
Other people had the problems you mentioned -- loss of library, SD card issues. Keyword searches of this forum (library, fat32) might dredge up some answers, if you haven't already found them.
Enjoy!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Filark

Sounds like you have it pretty much all figured out!

Well, a fair amount of it.

As mentioned above, I'm not a novice at this, and have a fair grounding in how Android works.

Most of the fun is figuring out the quirks of this device.

Other people had the problems you mentioned -- loss of library, SD card issues. Keyword searches of this forum (library, fat32) might dredge up some answers, if you haven't already found them.

I'll poke around as time permits.

Enjoy!

For suitable values of the term...
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

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.
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Dennis

[beachwanderer]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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.

As my old Edge (not Pocket Edge) is misbehaving lately I'll try to fix it if I find the time. Scanning the newer threads I came across your experiences with the Pocket Edge here. Thanks for keeping us informed. About WPS Office: The Onyx-Boox E43 E-Reader (+Phone) I have here runs on Android 2.3.5 and came with WPS Office 6.0.3 installed. I did not look at the version history / improvements from 5.x to 6.x but if you can get hold of an apk for the latter you could try that one too.