Help with a Cruz T301

[lomfs24]

Aside from the already well documented problems with the Cruz T301 tablet (problems that I didn't know about prior to buying one for myself and one for my wife) I have having a ton of problems with mine specifically. My wife's seems to be working as well as expected. However, mine will crash all the time. The reason I bought it was to use it as a reader and maybe use it for a few other apps. Most of the apps I wanted to use I found out later will either not work, crash or simply not load.

I can get about three pages into web surfing and then the browser will crash, the Kobo app will work about 50% of the time, the rest of the time the app will crash unexpectedly. I thought maybe I got one with a bad load on the OS. So I downloaded the update from Cruz. And it won't load the update. It's now past the time I can take it back to Radio Shack and I am stuck with a tablet that is literally useless.

When I say crash I mean it will either lock up, just close and go back to the main screen or it will give me the error box that says that it stopped unexpectedly and gives me buttons to either force close or wait. If I wait it will lock up and that's all she wrote.

I have already done a factory reset on it once and have only loaded apps from the Cruz market.

As I mentioned it already has Android 2.2 on it. I am beginning to wonder if there is not some part of the actual hardware is bad. Like maybe some bad memory or something.

Anyone else have problems like this?

[magkelly]

Actually while I am finding that some applications just plain won't run on it once they're installed most of them seem to work fine. I didn't like the Kindle, Kobo or Alkido readers or several others that I tried. They rather sucked I thought.

I don't like reading books online, or having them constantly dl every time I open an e-reader. I had a heck of a time importing e-books I already owned that didn't have DRM issues. Most of the readers I had to sign up and give CC info just to dl free public domain ebooks that were already on Gutenberg etc. It was lame.

I ended up installing an older application WordPlayer and that seems to work well. I have no problem importing epubs of any kind with it. It was a bit hard to find. It doesn't seem to be readily available anymore in the Cruz or other markets I tried, but I found it online finally and once installed it solved my problem with side loading my own books quite nicely.

I really like the Cruz so far. It's not a $500 Ipad but then again I didn't expect that at $60 and so far for a $60 tablet this thing is working fairly well. There's a learning curve and I can't always get around software incompatibilities but so far so good. I've got books, music, movies, even a game or three. I'm happy and so far no, no major glitches...

[exscentric]

Don't know much of your unit but you might try a couple things.

Be sure there isn't an update at their site.

Get a task killer if you don't have one and kill everything before opening your reader. Some tablets will open half a dozen apps for you and one might be interfering with your operations.

[lomfs24]

Ah, sorry for not updating this thread. The problem finally got fixed. It was really a two part solution.
1) There was something definitely wrong with my Cruz. It acted much like a computer would if it had a bad piece of RAM. And it crashed all the time, with everything. As I mentioned earlier my wife's seemed to run as well as expected, even if I was running it. So I knew it wasn't me. I took it back to Radio Shack and even though it was outside their return window by a few days they returned it and gave me another one. And it worked as well as my wife's.
2) I was still not happy with the tablet, I rooted it, I overclocked the processor, put a new operating system on it, etc... And bottom line, no matter what I did to it, it was still a cheap tablet. So the second part of the solution was to buy two Acer A500's from Walmart which I should have done in the first place and not been so cheap. Now, life is good. We have two good tablets and the kids have two tablets that will function as readers at least. Everyone is happy for today.

[alg2468]

I have had no problems with my Velocity Cruz T301. It's true, though, that some of the installed apps are buggy, but I called tech support at Velocity Micro and they were very helpful. Also I downloaded some apps at freewarelovers.com that worked very well, among them the iReader and MoonReader for reading books worked quite well, and Skyfire 4 is an improvement over earlier versions. Wordplayer is OK but sometimes slow. I have had problems with the Alkido reader and Wordaholic application.

[magkelly]

I've got ireader, moonreader and wordplayer on mine, all work okay, though I think the wordplayer is buggy and I use the other two more. So far there have been a few applications/games that just won't install like Angry Birds but I've actually got the tablet doing most everything I wanted it to be doing. I've got readers on there, I've got a few music and video applications on there. I've got my favorite game, several variants on Bejeweled actually. Basically I wanted to do books, movies on the go, and a couple of games and I've got that going. The Cruz is a bit slow at times, but you get what you pay for I suppose I can't expect it to run like a $500 pad all the time. I'm off to go get new glasses in a bit but tonight if you all like and it would help I can make a list of what's on there, what works for me?

[alg2468]

I have found that several of the applications at www.freewarelovers.com work well, but you will have to download the ones you'd like to try to an SD card, then insert the card into your tablet, install the application using the Astro application in you tablet, and see if the installation is successful. Some of the applications that work include Countries of the World, iHeart Radio, A Online Radio, 123 Clip Free, Units Convert, Google Translate, DocstoGo, and many others.