After a year of disappointing Android Honeycomb tablets, I think I finally have an Android tablet I can be happy with.
Android has been out for the Touchpad for a while, but I wanted to wait for it to mature a bit before hassling with it. And yesterday seemed like it was time for me to finally give it a try.
I used the
CM7 XRONified 2.8 ROM. Which uses CM7 Alpha 3.5 running Android 2.3.7. The
install is fairly simple. Install some drivers, copy a script installer to the driver folder. Copy the ROM and a couple other files to the tablet. Then run the script installer. This installs a multiboot utility on the tablet and partitions about 1.5GB of space for Android. And I didn't lose any data I already had saved on the tablet.
It's still Alpha stage, so not everything works 100%. Only issue I've really had is apps sometimes crash, but it hasn't happened too often and hasn't been a problem. Wifi has worked great for me, though some people sometimes have issues with it.
The XRONified ROM also includes some commonly used apps, including the Google apps, so it's pretty much got everything you need right away. Netflix works with a small tweak to the build.prop file (next version will include the tweak in the ROM). The performance is pretty good. Able to play HD video, though 720P MKV files don't work (but do work on the webOS side, so the hardware is capable), they are still working and improving performance of course. Games seem to run well for the most part.
And I have to confess I kinda like the 4:3 screen ratio for a tablet. 16:10 is great for video playback, but I like 4:3 more for web browsing because it gives more vertical viewing space and allows me to surf in portrait mode as well with still enough horizontal space. I would really like to see some more 4:3 ratio tablets from Android in the future. But I guess it's being avoided because they'll get sued by Apple.
I'm really impressed though with how well this ROM works at this Alpha stage.
