Walgreen’s now selling $99 Android tablet | Hacker News Reader

Walgreen’s now selling $99 Android tablet

the-digital-reader.com

113 pointspauljonas89 comments

Interesting. I would suggest anyone considering a tablet of any kind, buy one of these.

I bought the K-Mart Augen tablet on a lark. I figured it was a good way to gague how much I would actually use a tablet.

Mind you this thing is an utter peice of shit but what it showed me was that I could justify buying a Galaxy Tab. With both the B&N and Amazon clients on there and the native Android applications, a 7" tablet is really the perfect size for me and has the exact functionality I want (youtube for the kids, google web apps and reader clients for me.)

EDIT: You will be UTTERLY frustrated by the resistive touch screen on one of these tablets. That's one of the major reasons I'm looking forward to my Galaxy Tab.

What's so bad about the resistive touch screens?

I assume the resistive touch screen doesn't do multi-touch. In addition, it is probably less sensitive since it will require a bit of pressure and not just touch.

Exactly. the augen ships with a stylus which is annoying to have to pull out. I literally have an impossible time dragging down the notification shade on this thing.

One nice thing about the Augen is that there are some custom roms for it that speed it up considerably. As soon as I get my Galaxy tab, i'll probably donate this one to some hacker cause.

No multitouch, and responds better to a small hard tap than a large soft finger. Unlike iDevices, women with long fingernails would probably find it works better for them; for everyone else, a stylus is practically a necessity.

Not the end of the world, but a subpar experience if you're used to a capacitive touchscreen.

I hate being the city snob, but are we really cheering on the incoming mass of people that are OK with using resistive touch screen onto our apps/websites? Try this test: take a resistive touchscreen and a capacitive touchscreen, and scroll through a long list of names (like the address book). Drop your finger to stop the scrolling when you see a name zoom by. Come back and tell me which one was better. Apple is slowly incrementing the specifics of scrolling gestures across their technologies... the same scrolling gestures that works on my phone work on my macbook (except they're inverted, what's up with that?).

On the iOS device you're moving the document, on the WIMP computer you're moving the viewport.

> I hate being the city snob, but are we really cheering on the incoming mass of people that are OK with using resistive touch screen onto our apps/websites?

Yes, because until capacitives drop in price enough to make resistives utterly redundant, devices like this mean that they're going to represent 80% of the market (well, for some markets. Markets which it would be foolish to ignore). The people who have iPads now are lead users. Give it six months to a year, and the mainstream will catch up; the vast majority won't be buying iPads because they're seen (and priced) as premium products.

Besides, modern resistives don't have to be that bad. The one on my Nokia N900 is more than usable, and I have no issues whipping the stylus out for detail work.

Unless we explicitly opt out of being accessible to the mass market, it's incumbent on us to make our apps and websites work well for as many types of interface as possible. If the flick-and-stop gesture for contact searching doesn't work well on the majority of devices, then we need to find something which does. Just because Apple have picked something they can uniformly implement across their range doesn't naturally make it the best option for everyone; in fact, they're more likely to pick something that only they can implement well as a differentiator.

I think your points really get at the heart of the matter, thanks :)

I think the flick-and-stop gesture is truly brilliant HCI, and Apple went through a lot of testing before figuring out exactly how fast things should scroll for each piece of hardware they make. Once people are used to it, it truly becomes second nature, and doubly so because it's consistent across devices (with the exception that on the MB line, you "scroll the camera", while on the iPhone you "scroll the page").

Again, I'm conscious of my solipsism, I wouldn't want to create apps for users that don't know how to scroll on a trackpad or use the 'enter' key for the same reason I imagine making bikes targeted at professional athletes is a lot more fun than for recreational consumers.

Well, you have to press in a little to get the screen to register a touch. The practical outcome of this is that you want to use a stylus or something relatively hard and sharp instead of your finger. The screen's plastic is relatively soft and thus is easily scratched.

Has anyone seen this in stores yet? For $100 it'd be fun just to hack with (both the software and the hardware, since I doubt that you could get all of those components for cheaper).

Also, I love that the screenshot shows the browser with a IE-esque icon. Really shows the target market.

Looks like the guys over at droidforums.net got one: http://www.droidforums.net/forum/off-topic-forum/89150-maylo...

Walgreens website says they are not sold in stores.

http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/maylong-7-inch-m-150-wifi-m...

Does anyone know if that picture is just an iPad with the screen photoshopped to Android or is that what it actually looks like?

All of these cheap Android tablets look like the iPad.

Probably not if you put them side-by-side though...

It is absolutely a picture of an iPad, since you can see that it (the iPad) has been stretched out to accommodate the screenshot. The square on the home button isn't a square anymore.

its not. They just copied the look. (Check out the epad, and the apad and other versions of this pad)

Then why do all the hardware buttons (sleep, mute, volume, home) exactly match the layout of the buttons on the iPad? It looks exactly like a stretched out iPad with a mocked up screen shot.

I wouldn't be surprised if the product design spec was a stretched-out image of an iPad :-)

Yes. I played around with one of these in the Pearl Market in Beijing last week. All in all, I guess it's good for the price.

I like the size, it's okay for video and access to the Android store is great. The touch screen takes a very heavy touch, though. It was annoying after just 10 minutes.

This runs Android v1.6 and at least according to Maylong's (the manufacturer) support you can't upgrade to the latest Android due to hardware requirements.

Same as with many mainstream manufacturers' (Sony, Samsung, Acer) older and even not so old Android phones.

But that doesn't mean anything. Community should be fully able to maintain Android updates if manufacturer doesn't will (and haven't installed proprietary virtual brick walls to prevent rooting).

I don't think there are any real hardware limitations.

The WM8505 Android 1.6 release has some custom hacks in the UI library layer to work with their video hardware.

Since VIA released Linux kernel source for this SoC a few months ago, some other people have successfully worked out more about the graphics driver and started developing an alternative kernel from scratch[1]. With this understanding, the possibility of the community porting Froyo is higher than it was before.

However, AFAIK noone has really put strong effort into it. One of the reasons I lost interest is that 128Mb of RAM is apparently not enough to run 2.2 decently regardless, and that's all most of the tablets have. If this one has 256Mb then it might actually be up to it.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel

Outfits like dealextreme.com have had $85 Android tablets with V1.5/1.6 for the last year.

Until they support something newer (with app store ability) they are basically junk - so bad you might almost suspect Apple of building them just to poison the none-iPad market.

This thread contains a review from someone who actually received one.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=102746

I feel bad for the thousands of kids (with well-meaning parents) that will get this under the tree instead of an iPad this Christmas.

So from reading a couple of forum posts of people who actually bought this, the device does not have Android Market installed and does not have a setting which allows you to put it in "USB Debug" mode - which is a prerequisite for installing apps you have developed.

In short, hold on to that $99 if you are looking for anything other than a paperweight.

As it's a WM8505 based system then I'm sure these two things will be fairly quickly worked around. The modder community around this device's predecessors ($99 Eken M001 & others) is fairly strong and there are a lot of custom firmwares, with both these features.

EDIT: The slatedroid.com forums are probably the best reference source if you're interested in what people are doing with them.

Disposable computing is here at last.

I tend to put laptops in this category.

Like any good nerd I spent countless hours trying to figure a way to remove and use the screen on one of the broken laptops piled up in my closet. There's no good reason for that level of waste.

any success on that project?

Nobody has ever really had success with that sort of project, though I've been reading about people trying for the last 10 years or so.

Earth LCD is your best resource for LCD hackery. They have a controller kit that will drive certain LCD panels. It's $200 and will drive a panel at a rez up to 1024x768 http://store.earthlcd.com/NK-GM2221-421-LCD-Controller-KIt?s...

By contrast, I just bought a brand new 32" TV at Best Buy for a demo monitor. It was $450 and does 1920x1080.

Laptop LCDs use a variety of different interfaces, so it's hard to make a generic kit. By the time you do, the volume demand for such a kit is so low, you end up with having to price it in the $200-$300 dollar range to make your R&D and manufacturing costs back. For about the same money you can get an LCD monitor of similar size/resolution to the laptop display in an easy ready-to-use package.

brk sums it up. It's one reason I don't like laptops in general. Tossing those perfectly usable screens attached to a faulty motherboard is pretty distasteful.

For me it's always been the screen that died first...

You could put them on Craigslist or Ebay. I've bought two LCDs that way in order to repair other laptops of the same model with broken screens.

Its got a resistive touchscreen and probably no Market access, but it would be a really good Ubuntu tablet, if you don't mind using a stylus. The price is so low, I imagine a lot of hackers might start buying it. It shouldn't take long in that case to get a functioning port.

Might make a decent car computer, with some add-ons.

It's kind of crazy you can't buy a discreet touch screen this size for less than twice the price.

If it had a GPS it'd make a great car computer.

Never mind, I'll wait a year and probably be able to pick up something exactly as I described. Replace my car iPod and my GPS with one device. I suppose I could do this right now with an iPad but I'd have to pay for the 3G to get google maps -- I'd rather have internal maps.

If you're going to mount it in a car, just plug in a USB GPS.

I'm skipping this one as a car computer because I bet the screen is junk and the memory is awfully small. In a year there should be a bunch of good ones to choose from.

No you wouldn't. You'd have to buy the 3G version to get the GPS censor, but there are plenty of apps available that store your maps on the iPad. I'm pretty sure the GPS censor works fine without a 3G plan...

it does.

Unfortunately, it won't run any of the most recent versions of Ubuntu because it's an ARM9 (ARMv5).

However, people have a minimal-esque Debian installation running on its other WM8505-based cousins fairly well: http://www.slatedroid.com/eken-m001-debian/

Thanks for the link. I didn't know of this site. Can you recommend any cheap tablets that would be fun to hack on?

I only have an M001, which has the advantage of being popular so there are people modding it, and some people working on a clean implementation of the linux kernel (groups.google.com/group/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel)

If you want to do some kernel device driver writing, binary reverse-engineering, or port Android 2.2, those are all good things you can try on the M001 (or the Walgreens tablet, same SoC.)

However, there are better cheap tablets. $200ish can get you one built around the TI OMAP3 platform. One is called the Wits A81E. For a lot of tinkering, that's probably a much better buy - Android 2.2 already runs, you get a Cortex A8 instead of an ARM9 (so it -will- run recent Ubuntu versions), and the OMAP3 SoCs have properly open sourced and mature linux drivers. I haven't actually used one, though.

It really depends on what you want to do with it, I guess.

Are there any good Android tablets that are iPad size? I don't care about spending near iPad prices, but so far all I've been able to find is 7" crap Android tablets.

No, there aren't. Nor the iPad size, nor any other size (not counting smartphones ;-)). The first good one is Galaxy Tab.

I was about to make a comment complaining about them taking so long, but after looking it up the iPad has only been out for half a year. Seems like it has been longer than that.

Why is it good? I have played around with the tab, and while It wasn't bad, I expected it to be way cheaper. Since they are about the Same price, choosing an iPad would be a total no-brainer for me

You are right, but the question was if such an Android tablet exist. Maybe someone would choose tab due its more portable size.

Archos do a 10-inch tablet and generally it's okay spec wise e.g. capacitive screen. I've not read any reviews yet as it's only just out.

This reminds me of a Palm Zire I got free with a set of tires, way back when people actually carried PDAs around with them. I quickly discovered how much of an impractical piece of junk it was to use, and it's been collecting dust in a drawer or box somewhere ever since. I predict a similar fate for many of these underpowered resistive screen tablets.

You know, with all these commodity tablets popping up, I wonder how you can actually trust the manufacturer. Each tablet appears to run a customized version of Android...how do you know that the manufacturer didn't modify it to send along all of your private data as you use it?

It's funny you say that because the version of Android developed for the WM8505 (the SoC in the Walgreens) silently phones home to a company in China for "license verification". Or, at least it did a few months ago.

http://projectgus.com/2010/07/eken-m001-phone-home/

(As I said in my blog post, nothing in the device indicated it was phoning home and the code was obfuscated to disguise these details. There's nothing particularly stopping any of these small companies from choosing to send other details if they wanted to.)

This, along with a thousand other reasons, is why it is so important that the hardware not impose restrictions on what the owner can load on the device. Running custom ROMs is not just for phones, but is for anyone who has special requirements (privacy, speed, specific usage domain, etc).

I wonder if Walgreens is complying with GPL by including a notice for source with the device, and some way for customers to access it. Certainly Maylon Group doesn't seem to have anything on their site.

(Sorry to sound like a broken record.)

I mean this in a genuinely inquisitive spirit: is it Walgreen's responsibility to provide such a thing, considering they are just the retail outlet for the device?

I would expect that Maylon Group (or whoever is the actual system integrator) is on the hook for publishing customizations.

If Walgreens are distributing (ie selling) a product containing GPL licensed software, my understanding is that they are legally responsible for GPL compliance.

Of course, in practice, it's really the Maylon Group or whoever that will have to provide the source.

However, to the best of my knowledge, the customer's only legal contract is with Walgreens, and its up to Walgreens to deal with Maylon Group (or whoever their supplier is) and ensure compliance - the end customer can't make any claim on Maylon directly.

FWIW, there's a bunch of similar Android tablets at DealExtreme. I can't speak to the quality, and I assume its not good, but you can get a 7" tablet with Android 2.1 for $160.

http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.android%20tablet...

Just put in an order for one. I'll do a review here on HN when I receive it.

I'd like to compare the performance of this tablet to that of a 7" USB touchscreen connected to a SheevaPlug or BeagleBoard.

I bought a Nokia N770 tablet back in the day for the same price, but was never able to get the development environment working right (everyone had moved on to the N800). I hope the Android OS on this tablet is as hackable as Maemo.

So, to eyeball it:

This is an ARM9, probably @ 350Mhz[1], hand-wavey-performance around 1.1DMIPS/Mhz, minimal video acceleration.

BeagleBoard is a Cortex A8, 720Mhz, 2.0DMIPS/Mhz, with video acceleration (probably not via a USB video output, but via one of the Beagle adapters.)

SheevaPlug is 1.2Ghz, no idea what ARM series the Kirkwood is equivalent to. Obviously no possibility of accelerated video there.

N770 was a 250Mhz ARM9 with some video acceleration features.

Speaking from my own experience, I have a tablet with the same WM8505 SoC (Eken M001) and it runs Android 1.6 fine. I find for normal browsing and such that its biggest limitation is the poor quality touchscreen, far before anything else.

>I hope the Android OS on this tablet is as hackable as Maemo.

Nope. I've already posted a comment about it, but there are a bunch of proprietary library-level video customisations that noone has yet fully reverse engineered.

If you want a tablet with BeagleBoard-like performance and good hackability then there are some OMAP3 Cortex-A8 tablets for around the $200 mark (Wits A81e is one). Better performance, better open source support.

[1] Despite what Walgeens say, all of the previous WM8505 devices top out at 350Mhz.

I think it would be relatively straightforward to do accelerated video on USB touchscreens (like the MIMO) using a BeagleBoard. The GPU would be set up to render to an off-screen buffer, the udlfb frame buffer pointed at the off-screen buffer, and the udlfb damage ioctl called for the entire frame every time glSwap() is called (or using normal damage events for non-immediate-mode applications). It would probably be good for about 30fps.

Can this access the app store? Are there only certain apps it can run?

How would this be for reading?

I wonder if this will force apple to drop the price of the base iPad now. Probably not seeing as they didn't do it for the iPod which had a lot more competition, but the spread between $99 and $499 is a bit too much...

I don't think so. It's like the spread between a 299$ netbook and a 999$ macbook.

Apple isn't one to compete on price.

Also for people that want an iPad, this isn't competition, in the same way that people who want a BMW a Kia isn't competition.

This is probably the most succinct analogy on computer pricing discussion I've seen that a lot of people just don't seem to realize. Perhaps we haven't had the concept of a "luxury computer" long enough in our heads to make it seem natural in the same way we think of luxury / economy cars.

It's been around for a while now and is, by all reports, completely terrible.

I don't think Apple is really going to feel the effects of this thing in the least.

No, but Apple will drop the price on the iPad eventually. Not too much, though -- they'll probably keep the base price at $399 and add more memory.

Apple price points don't tend to change (this is by design). I would expect the next version of the iPad to have additional features (a front-facing camera is guaranteed) and more memory and probably a slightly better processor, but I wouldn't count on spending any less money.

Interesting point: have Apple ever completely misjudged a product price point and moved it rather than redesigning the product? I'm not enough of a student of their history to know any examples.

I'd say original iPhone comes close to that.

I'd argue that they got the price right; they just weren't charging the right people. After all the carrier sweeteners are added to the pot, I would fully expect the margins on a subsidized iPhone to be equal to (if not greater than) those on a naked iPhone. But thinking that they could crack carrier dominance was a bit of a stretch, as laudable a goal as it was.

they have been selling this since july

Does anyone know if these cheap android devices can be hacked to run real Linux? One of these plus a Bluetooth keyboard might be kind of fun

I just ordered mine

Here is the FAQ http://www.maylonggroup.com/support_tablet.htm

Here are the specs, since the walgreens page was made by an idiot:

http://www.maylonggroup.com/M-150_MID.htm

---

CPU ARM9(VM8505+)

Memory RAM 256MB DDR

Flash Built-in Flash

Display Touch Panel 7" TFT LCD

Resolution 800 X 480 Pixels

WIFI 802.11b/g

Input/Output

Touch Panel Resistive type touch panel

Speaker Built-in loud speakers

SD/MMC T-Flash card slot

Network/USB Dongle for RJ-45 network and USB connection

Buttons/Switches Power On/Off, Volume adjustment

Battery Built-in Li-Polymer battery

Charger Input AC 100-240V, 0.5A

Output 9V, 1500MA

Physical Characteristics Dimension 7.5" X 4.6" X 0.3"

Weight 12 OZ

What the hell is an Internet Explorer icon doing in the "Dock" on that screenshot?

It's a cheap Chinese ripoff of the iPad. Even their product image is literally just a photoshopped picture of an iPad. What do you expect?

I read somewhere that the IE icon is a symbol for web access in general in some parts of the world.

I know that in Korea, IE / Windows is basically the only choice, no one really registers the existence of anything else, so I presume it would be pretty similar in the rest of east Asia.

Korea is a special case; the government essentially mandated IE until very recently: http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monocultu...

I think that was done as a courtesy not to make North Korea's government look that bad in comparison.

Duh, IE = The Internet

In my experience, you really only see Integer Explorer in China.

That being said, locally modified versions of Internet Explorer are extremely common. I can't remember their names off the top of my head, but even relatively unsophisticated users frequently download alternative versions of IE, which are generally based off of older IEs. (At least last time I was living there, which was about 16 months ago, so take this with a grain of salt)

Web designers / developers aren't focused on standards in the same way they are in the US/Europe, so other browsers may not display pages as expected. The Chinese Internet is quickly catching up with the rest of the world's in terms of quality, but it still lags behind.

Also, a significant chunk of the population primarily uses computers in Web Cafes rather than at home, so they don't even have the option of installing other browsers.

Perhaps you were thinking of Maxthon (http://www.maxthon.com/)?

Wouldn't this thing work great with IOS?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com