Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet | Hacker News Reader

Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

arstechnica.com

148 pointsarnemart89 comments

i bought one to play with. it wasn't quite as good as the reviewer said, although i briefly got the wireless working. My run time was about 20 min before dead batteries. It took 45 minutes for Walgreens to figure out how to refund my money, and in the end could only refund it within $2 on my creditcard with the rest in cash

I pity all the uninformed consumers who buy this, or even worse, people who receive this as a gift from those uninformed consumers...

I pity even more the computer-savvy relatives/friends/neighbors of the aforementioned uninformed consumers.....

// praying that no-one I know buys one!

I almost did run down to Walgreens to buy one when I heard about it. I thought, "Android is open source, it should be fun to hack right? How bad can it be?" It seems the answer is really really bad. Much of it reminds me of my original Phillips Windows CE 1.0 device I had. Glad I didn't go and buy one.

Its bad when a device that was never supposed to run Android (the iPhone) can be hacked to run it better than a device that was designed for it.

Hell, I'd be wary of a $5 LED nightlight sold at Walgreens.

Could you explain the joke for non-Americans?

Most electronics equipment sold at Walgreens are of low quality. Its a pharmacy and general store. Most of their electronics are novelties at best.

No joke, really. It's a drugstore/pharmacy that also sells greeting cards, house cleaning supplies, candy, snacks, coke and pepsi and milk, and really low-quality hardware like screwdrivers made of weak steel.

The sorts of electronics they sell there are overpriced and low-quality unless they're actual name-brand items. An LED nightlight sold there is likely to be weak, and badly designed, and overpriced even at $5.

If I saw a $99 Android tablet at Walgreens, I would assume that it would be better to simply burn the $99 - at least then I wouldn't have a useless device to store or dispose of.

(I was just at a Walgreens, and they actually had some Wii units for sale. I wouldn't buy one there, but I assume there's nothing wrong with them.)

I don't know how much there is to explain.

I don't know that Walgreens has that much of a reputation, but I think of them mostly as a drugstore, even though they carry a lot of random stuff. They are a fairly large chain with stores all over the country.

That said, they're not really somewhere you go shopping for high class goods or electronics.

walgreens was a small drugstore chain. they got national when they started selling alcohol during prohibition as a remedy (exactly like it happens with marijuana in some states now).

nowadays they sell pretty much everything, even prescription medicine in a distant corner :)

most of what they sell is cheap snacks, 99cents products and trinkets.

also walgreens and other drugstores here all have their own brand of copied medicine "walgreens product X. compare to Brand Y product X" on the labels

'I almost did run down to Walgreens to buy one when I heard about it. I thought, "Android is open source, it should be fun to hack right? How bad can it be?" It seems the answer is really really bad.'

If Android using the Apache license means that vendors only have to provide the (Google) source they started from and not for the final result, you basically can't hack what you got, but have to deal with code that was never customized for the device you've got. In effect the source was open for the vendor, but it isn't for you. So much for fixing bugs in what you get...

I'd considered getting one for a six-year-old to bang on. As I started reading, I was thinking "maybe with alternative firmware," but the OOBE sounds atrocious.

Devices like these can be very harmful to Android's image in the public, especially if their only feature/selling point is "powered by Android".

My brother bought a Samsung Galaxy cellphone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy). The half-baked combination of hardware and software, with no updates available, made him soon regret the purchase. He was angry at Samsung and Google/Android for "producing such crap". Somehow he managed to return it and got an iPhone instead.

This experience made him to not buy an Android phone again. More of such bad examples/devices could become a really big problem for Android.

Conversely, the Samsung Galaxy S class of phones (I have the Captivate from AT&T) is a wonderful device. The only limitation is that it is still on 2.1, but it is supposed to be upgrade "sometime". That's AT&T's fault, though.

I think they've learned their lessons since the first Galaxy.

It seems that there's much dependency on carriers and manufacturers in the Android world.

What if security related bugs are discovered? Are there minor updates to fix these? And how fast are they deployed by the carrier or manufacturer?

It is not entirely carriers' fault though. Samsung is yet to roll-out the update even in out countries like India, where carriers don't interfere with it at all.

To top it all off, they've disabled OTA and need a Windows only desktop software (Kies) to update the OS. The latest version of this doesn't upgrade even minor upgrades of the firmware.

A HN user suggested a workaround on another thread by downgrading the version of Kies. When I tried it, it didn't even show that a minor firmware upgrade was available.

While Galaxy is wonderful on the hardware side, it has miles to go with its software.

I agree, but that's generally true of hardware companies. Intel's software (other than their compiler) is terrible. I wish hardware companies would just agree on a standard and let the software companies (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) handle synchronization.

Yes, I know it is isn't as easy as that, but it would have to be better than the ghetto that is hardware company-supplied software.

Right, and tablets generally. If a lot of ordinary users buy these or receive them as Christmas presents they may just conclude that tablets and/or Android are worthless and should be avoided in any future purchases.

More likely, they'll think, "I should've gotten an iPad!"

"I don't get all this talk about the I-Pad. I bought a pad of some sort at Walgreens and had to return it. Pads aren't very good for anything."

I am replying to you now from one. It is working alright especially for the price.

BBYOpen, Best Buy's API team, found some other interesting uses for the $99 Android tablet... :)

http://bbyopen.com/2010/11/maylong-android-tablet-more-versa...

This reminds me of when one of my good friends came back from China with a knockoff iPhone. I bought his extra one off him for $50 out of sheer curiosity. Everything this article said about the knockoff tablet vs. the real thing was true for the phone--it was billed as a touch phone and yet came with a stylus, because using it with your fingers was impossible; in fact using it with the stylus was almost impossible too. It had the look-and-feel of an iPhone, but all the apps were clearly just cheap, badly translated knockoffs that were just truly awfully made. The wifi would "connect" but never worked. The screen was scratched after two days of use.

I ended up sending a few text messages with it (it took me 15 minutes to compose each one because of the awful interface) and after messing around with it for a while got so frustrated that I promptly "lost" it.

It was a great conversation starter though--"Hey, want to see my Chinese iPhone?" It always got a laugh out of people when I showed them.

Quality for Chinese products varies, though. A friend of mine uses as a main phone a chinese one, mostly because it can take two sim cards (i.e., two phone numbers). It's good enough for daily, intense use, and as a bonus and laugh factor it also has an antenna and TV included.

That said, my experience with Chinese products and parts has been less then satisfactory. I guess we don't really have any way to discern good products from bad... no "brand recognition" to speak of. It's too bad, because I bet there are a lot of good companies out there making good products.

I bought one for my girlfriend's two-year-old to watch Sesame Street. It works for that, and if she decides to throw it on the ground (which she's still learning not to do), hey, at least it wasn't an expensive cell phone or something.

Mostly I agree with the article's assessment on the touchscreen. I haven't had any trouble with the wireless on mine, though.

"No applications can perform this action." just replaced "lp 0 on fire" as my all time favorite error message.

It's like you asked it to solve the halting problem, or violate one of Asimov's laws.

I learned about the Nook Color over the weekend. It has the potential to be a really good Android tablet ($249, 800MHz A8, 8GB storage). Only thing is that it's restricted to running apps approved by B&N, and it's running 2.1.

I wonder how long till it's rooted?

Not long at all, hopefully.

http://fineoils.blogspot.com/2010/11/nook-colour-root-is-nea...

They got it to boot from an sd card, which is a step in the right direction. When it gets rooted, it will be one hell of a tablet for its price. Is this a loss leader for B&N? It seems very cheap for its build quality.

My favorite part - "anyone looking to buy one would get more bang for the buck by setting it on fire for warmth. "

I'd be tempted to use one of these as a device which simply displays a custom written webpage which fetches and displays information. Once you've got it running it does nothing other than display a webpage. Put it on the desk, plugged in constantly. It could show my calendar or weather/traffic data.

What's a small LCD panel cost instead?

Generally more. And they don't come with integrated WiFi or enough CPU to display anything on their own.

I'm trying to figure out if one of these would be useful as a wireless display for data that updates once every 5 minutes or so.

I live at a retreat center in the Cascade mountains, and we've got all sorts of diagnostic data about our hydroelectric generator and furnaces that would be useful to show.

I'm interested in info on this retreat. Is there anything available online? Does the retreat have a name?

http://www.holdenvillage.org/

I'm presently the IT Coordinator, which is an odd mix of Windows Systems Administration, Network Administration, and Website maintenance. (Sooner or later maybe some web development.)

Oooh, I was wondering what that was on the map! I spent a bunch of time last summer adventuring up the Suiattle River, just 10 miles due west of you.

> The lag is slow and inconsistent, forcing you to always wonder if you need to hit something again or whether the M-150 is just trying to figure out if you hit S, A, or D.

I almost missed this journalistic easter egg!

Also… did you see the thumbnail they are using to link to this story? They photoshopped in some, er, brown froyo. http://static.arstechnica.net/assets/2010/11/m-150-list-thum...

I still can’t get over the IE icon showing up on an Apple-imitating “dock.”

Sometime in the last year, ArsTechnica picked up a really good artist for their article art. There are times I'll read articles there just to see the images this person creates. I get a laugh out of them pretty frequently.

My personal favourite is the image and caption used at the start of this article: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/03/blockbuster-gets-d...

Agree. I like the one they made for this article: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/10/tri-screen-cpu-...

I'm surprised no one has asked this yet:

How easy is this thing to hack? At $99 for a small ARM system with a 7" screen and battery, this is a damn good deal compared to getting a similar setup with a BeagleBoard.

How easy is this thing to hack?

Easy-ish. It's a Wondermedia WM8505-based tablet, so there are a bunch of other relatives (same Android port, AFAIK) like the Eken M001.

Here are some resources:

* Teardown/serial console: http://projectgus.com/2010/06/eken-m001-teardown-serial-cons... (disclaimer: that's my blog.)

* Debian port (forum is offline atm, though): http://www.slatedroid.com/eken-m001-debian/

* Open source kernel from scratch (work in progress): http://groups.google.com/group/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel http://gitorious.org/linux-on-via-vt8500

* Kernel released by Wondermedia (dog's breakfast): http://github.com/projectgus/kernel_wm8505 (That last one is a link to my github copy of their tarball release, with a couple of tweaks.)

similar setup with a BeagleBoard

It's worth pointing out that similar ain't really similar. The CPU technology is two generations older (ARM9), connectivity is more limited, open source availability is more limited, and hardware quality is significantly worse.

It is a good bit cheaper, though. :D

Thanks for the links! Reading threads like this (http://groups.google.com/group/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel/br...) definitely makes the BeagleBoard look like a good value in comparison.

Yeah, if you get a kick out of reverse engineering then it's a plus.

If you don't, then you're better off with something like the BeagleBoard where the TI OMAP3 technical docs, BSP + libraries are all published and have well-supported open source around them.

EDIT: It's worth pointing out that the linked thread is about reverse-engineering the RGB565 graphics mode (for Android) and some of the other esoteric graphics chipset features. Graphics in X11 work fine at the moment, both with Wondermedia's kernel release and with Alexey's open source one. Support for most "normal" WM8505 functions is present in one way or another.

There seem to be a few sub-standard Android tablets around at the moment. A high-street clothing retailer in the UK recently released one for £180, which was also entertainingly panned by the press:

“All in all, a disastrous piece of gadgetry.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010...

“If this were a car it would be roughly in the category of a Robin Reliant from a couple of decades ago.” http://www.pda-247.com/wordpress/2010/10/next-10”-tablet-rev...

A common concern is that these products will damage the reputation of Android as a platform, and I suspect that’s true.

If Google were smart, they'd come out with their own Android tablet. That way people would stop being enticed by this absolute crap.

Nexus One? It's a larger screen than most devices, but still not a "tablet" I guess. Maybe this was their test run.

If it was their test run, evidence seems to be that they've gotten back out of the make-your-own hardware game.

The Nexus One was made by HTC, basically a rebadge of their Desire handset. The Nexus S that Google have been showing off but not yer announced is basically the Samsung Galaxy S.

So either Google was never in that game, or they're still in it depending on definitions.

I see! When Google stopped selling the Nexus One to end users there was speculation that they were done branding handsets. Guess it was just speculation.

Will Google also sell it at Walgreens? Because if not, the people who are enticed by low-end gadgets sold at Walgreens will not know about it.

People will buy it because it says "Google", in the same way products are bought because they say "Apple".

There have been rumorings that Google is working on a tablet. I'm really hoping so - the Nexus One was an excellent reference phone, and really kickstarted the current generation of Android phones. If they could do similar with a tablet, I'd be really happy.

Google seems to have stalemated itself. They don't want to compete with ChromeOS or cannibalize it - so they are deliberately de-emphasizing tablet uses of Android. But at the same time they can't seem to deliver ChromeOS, so it's all just going nowhere.

In general I like Google's attitude of embracing multiple products and letting the best one win. However that seems to be getting lost here as their obsession with ChromeOS is significantly impairing Android's progress on the table front (or at least, that's the only way I can really explain what's happening).

When people talk about the problems of Android fragmentation, its this low end where things get really scary.

It is also at the low end that things get interesting. Most people get caught up in this fight over Android and iOS, so they never see that they are completely divergent platforms. Android will achieve ubiquity over the next few years. Toasters to phones to tablets to GPS units to military handhelds will all run it. The only thing that has been holding back such ubiquity so far has been Google's refusal to license the Market to devices which do not contain a "phone". If and when that changes, things will start to heat up. We already have decent $130 handsets running 2.2. How long do you think before Android is the new Symbian, with people buying "dumbphones" with Android without realising they've got it? Fragmentation be damned, it is a by-product of ubiquity.

These devices really are cheap and nasty. I have an Eken M001 and an M003, which are the same WM8505 chipset and (AFAIK) the exact same Android port.

However, if you're stuck with one then it's worth loading one of the alternative firmwares from http://www.slatedroid.com/ on it. People have done quite a lot with the closed source Android port to make it more usable.

They also make for good tinkering/reverse-engineering on a budget. I'm actually just winding up a (very hacky) early stage Android 2.2 port to this chipset. although it isn't showing signs of being very good to use, it's been fun to hack together.

Closed source Android port? I thought Android was open?

Android is Apache licensed, so AOSP source is available but most vendors do not release their own source code that actually ships on the device.

The Android port on the WM8505 has a ton of hardware-specific hacks in it, including significant custom userland code to set the framebuffer modes up properly. Things that would be put into the kernel in a well-designed system (IMHO.)

Interesting; I didn't know that. Thanks!

So alternate firmware really doesn't help that much? The hardware is too rough to salvage?

It's really hard to make convincing generalisations about this.

A lot of people seem to be happy with their cheapie tablets as a e-readers, tinker boxes, light web browsers, portable video players, etc.

Noone who really wants an iPad equivalent is going to be happy with one, though. Different leagues.

Like all technology, it comes down to what you want to do with it. I'm not a very good measure of that, because I originally bought an M001 to hack on (I originally wanted to use mine as a cheap robotics controller, however it developed a hardware fault that makes it difficult to power on so it's not really a good candidate any more.)

I played with one last week. It ranks slightly below the CueCat in usefulness.

This is exactly why Apple don't lease their software to device makers. If you want to be known for quality you _have_ to curate the whole experience.

Android is certainly achieving an amount of ubiquity but that also means they will be associated with these horror stories. Obviously, not true of Apple.

So does anybody know of a decent cheap android tablet? I'd really like to have one so I can browse the internet in my bed before I got to sleep and I don't want to pay ~600€ (iPad,tab) for that (and I don't live in USA where this is "pocket change") ...

I haven't tried one, but the archos 70 is capacitive, 7" android 2.2 (I believe, even though the web page says 2.1), 1ghz, 8gb, hdmi. For $275USD and it's shipping now (though in limited supply). It seems to be getting decent reviews by android folks.

https://store.archos.com/archos-internet-tablet-p-5004.html

There is also a 10" version (the 101) that seems to be newly available in some markets for ~$400USD.

I wonder how other companies making quality Android products feel about this. I'm not sure how ubiquitous the term "Android" is in the cell phone market (obviously the more informed consumers know, but what about more casual users?) but it seems like a lot of the commercials for the phones in the higher end mention that the phone runs Android.

Can the casual consumer differentiate between a terrible device that runs Android and a great device that runs Android? Would one bad experience with Android on a horrible device preclude that person from buying another Android product, even if the other product provides a quality UX?

The price still amazes me even after hearing how bad it is.

I'm having the exact same experience with the $150 Android Tablet from KMart - the Augen. Wireless works, but the touch screen is really hard to use, and the battery dies fast, even when off, so every time I turn it on I have to plug it in.

I saw these things being sold all over Shenzhen about a month and a half ago. The were really cheap (after haggling, of course), but the quality was terrible. Oh and in Shenzhen they were actually being sold as "iPads".

I'd almost be interested in getting one to be an internet radio gadget. But that's about it.

Except for the bit where the only app that can get online is the browser.

Well, at least it has a webcam.

There are crap copy-cats from china all over the place. go to dealextreme and you will find 200 models of windows mobile tablets!

i have one to run GPS in my car. cost me $50 and has a 7in screen! works perfectly... for the price.

but the first ones where just crappy. unusable. slow. battery was as good as that one. look for some old reviews.

With that one it will be the same.

As soon as there is real competition in the android tablet/netbook market the chinese copy-cats will start to show up some really good products.

mark this: android will only be a HUGE hit when those devices that does not goes out of their way to prevent hacking start to hit the market. and it is starting

The little android momentum had so far was a mistake on the part of manufacturers. they by accident let android be hackable. and are fixing it, for android loss.

I don't litter because I don't want to make that Indian cry, but this will make him put a shotgun in his mouth.

Manufacturers should be forced to properly recycle such garbage.

Competing with Apple on price alone in a market they essentially created. Great strategy..

Seems to have worked for some chaps in Redmond, at least since 1995

You're comparing Microsoft to the guys who made this tablet? Yikes..

There was a veritable Cambrian explosion of different personal computer designs in the late 70s early 80s before the PC came along that existed contemporaneously with the Apple II.

Pretty much all of these were evolutionary dead ends.

Yes and in 1995 one of them made an OS with pretty pictures and clicky mousey thing that looked very much like someones elses pretty pictures and clickey mousey thing.

Except theirs cost $99 or free with your costco computer - while the other guys meant you had to spend $1500+

I'd guess there were similar reviews of Altair 8800 in 1975/76 ;-)

Well, the Altair was the first of its kind. Despite its flaws, it was a revolutionary product that sparked an entire market. This tablet, on the other hand, comes after the iPad and other less shoddy Android competitors. If there's innovation in the tablet space, it's not going to be kickstarted by cheap knockoffs.

It was the first cheap computer. Cheap enough for the unwashed masses in US. And tablets like this one are the first computers cheap enough for billions of ppl in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And for many, many, many other purposes.

90% of the time innovation in IT is kick-started by cheap knockoffs ;-)

90% of innovation in most fields comes from low end products working their way up - hasn't anyone here read Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma? In fields from steel, backhoes, and IT most innovation starts with something that isn't quite good enough and works its way up quality. The tablet discussed in the original post may be just a cheap knock-off that isn't going to have any effect. But then how did they get the cost that low? Maybe there is something there to build on too? Only time and a bit more work will tell for sure.

Wow, unabashed apple fluffer arstechnica finds and reviews cheapest example of shenzhen style knockoff tech with expectations of terribleness, and confirms they don't like it a bit, no sir, not at all.

In other news, there is a lot of water in the pacific ocean.

I disagree, Ars Technica is one of the least biased tech blogs I've found. If anything they're biased against Apple.

Like it or not the products sucks and runs Android.

ars? biased against apple? surely you troll.

Ars Technica's most notable Apple reporter, John Siracusa, still holds a grudge against Apple for nearly every way in which Mac OS X went with a NeXT-style user interface over a Classic Mac OS UI paradigm.

They do a good job of producing informative articles, but you have to watch out for anything subjective, because a lot of it is quite unreasonable, and it's quite common for their conclusions about an Apple product to be invalid and useless for anyone living in the real world. The apparent bias in any given article can be all over the map, but on average, they seem to slightly prefer being unfair to Apple.

Let's see what a long time ars writer had to say about apple coverage on ars in may:

http://arstechnica.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=20423946&si...

It seems to be a level of magnitude harder to find and retain people who are enthusiastic about non-apple stuff who are authoritative, can write well, reliable, and who are affordable.

We don't get review hardware from anyone (generally) and we don't have a budget to purchase stuff, so we rely on our writers reviewing their own purchases. Most of our editors and writers prefer to purchase Apple stuff, so that's what we review.

I know that there's plans in the works to get an HTC Evo 4G and I think Jacqui might review it, but while she's reviewed a ton of iPhones, she's unsure she can do an android phone justice (as she's never used one before).

On a final point, I should say that the readers of Ars and people from around the Internet seem to value what we have to say about Apple stuff. By any metric you pick, our readers are more enthusiastic about Apple stuff. Now that could just be self-selecting bias, right?

So lets see. They're saying they don't have an easy time attracting talent that can write about things that aren't apple, most of their staff prefers and buys apple equipment, the author of this article who has reviewed iphone after iphone had never _used_ an android phone before, and their readership are apple fans, and apple coverage draws more traffic.

But, of course, if anything they're biased against apple.

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