So, a coworker pointed me at a chrome book, and said, "Look, it's awesome, 10+ hours battery!" I was skeptical, I've heard horrendous things about chromebooks' usefulness, but then I found out chromebooks give you access to TTY, so in theory you can use all the nifty CLI utilities that make Linux/Unix systems so great to work with. So I went back and reexamined how I use my endless supply of various devices, from desktop to mobile phone. For the most part, I use my phone to call, stream, or browse. I use my laptop to connect to my development machine (It's just inconvenient to hold my code on my local machine for a variety of reasons, and it's not really safe practice anyways.) A short while ago, I was looking for a tablet with a data plan, and I couldn't find one - even carriers with unlimited data plans don't support tablets with unlimited data plans. Damn it! Then, as I was researching chromebooks, I realized something spectacular - despite tablets having a thicker, and therefore heaver screens, tablets are in general 1/2 the weight of chromebooks. (wtf?) So I went in search of system on a board computers, and I found MK802, which could cover all the essentials - a keyboard w/ trackpad, wifi, bluetooth, audio, video. But then I realised - I've got a heap of old android devices from the G1 all the way up to my most recent (but still outdated) Samsung I515 (whatever that's called in common-folk-tongue). And I thought to myself, "Why not use the PCB out of one of those old, working-but-outdated phones to make a DIY tablet or chromebook which will probably weigh less than COTS chromebooks, register as a cellphone with the carriers, have unlimited LTE data, and 20hr battery life?" The Droid Charge seemed like the best candidate. Although I have a couple extra I515s, the awesome thing about the Droid Charge is that it has an HDMI port. Work on the fly, come home, hook it up to a proper monitor, instant win!
Unfortunately, I haven't ever worked with drivers, firmware or the likes. I could probably MacGyver a way to hook up a keyboard with a touchpad to use the micro usb jack (I mean I'd just need to emulate hooking the DC to a dock, right?), but the real blocker for me would be the screen. I imagine there MUST be a way to swap the stock LCD and touch screen digitizer on the Droid Charge, and hook up a 10-12in one, probably from some other Samsung product, but that's completely speculation. I was hoping someone on here could help me out with hashing out how to do the screen swap up to a 10-12in screen.
Thanks,
Misha
Related
I'm sure a lot of you have thought this over so i wanted to get your opinions.
The other day I was telling a friend about a phone with a 5+ inch screen and got to thinking (I love big screens, cant stand less than 3")... At what point should a person just buy a netbook with a 3g card and use VOIP on a bluetooth headset? I mean, my wife has a MSI Wind and honestly It is small enough I could carry it almost everywhere with me. It also cost less than my phone!!!!. The Wind isn't even one of the smaller ones. It has a 10.2 screen. Look at this one though http://gizmodo.com/5084147/umids-mini-netbook-makes-eees-look-massive (they should have made the screen wider but I guess they were trying to use off the shelf parts to keep it cheap).
I think the lines are definitely blurring and I honestly cant decide what to do for my next phone. A netbook with a 3g router is sounding very tempting. What thoughts do you guys have? or do you plan to just buy both lol.
I'd draw the line where you'd feel like a tit holding a netbook against your head tbh. Phones are for making phonecalls remember
Smartphone's are going to die out soon. Why do I need a Touch HD AND a netbook? I don't, I need a littlebitty Nokia that only phones and texts - discuss...
pocket
it´s true that you can carry them, but even little notebooks can´t be put inside your pants pockets...yet....
It's about convergence, having one device that does it all.
I still see idiots carrying a cellphone, an ipod, and a notebook. And they use the phone to go online with their notebooks via 3G.
I just have my i780 and the extra battery pack (i780s come with an extra batt with a stand alone charger case).. and oh yeah.. I also use it for GPS navigation.
Go for one device that can do it all. Though your need for a big screen will be the deciding factor.
Personally i have all three and carry two, Trinity and iPod, on a regular basis as the battery in my Trinity struggles to last all day sometimes when i am reading and replying to mail let alone trying to listen to music as well. Also my iPod is big enough to hold my entire library so there's no "wish i had that with me today" moments. The notebook is for computing somewhere at a desk/table that isn't my own, usually my parents or friends, and as such usually hooks to their WiFi.
You don't stick the netbook to your ear you use a bluetooth headset. Also some of these netbooks are getting small enough to stick in your pocket! Look at the one I linked.
Battery life would be an issue though. My wifes Wind lasts about 45 mins on battery. Those reviews that claim 2.5 hours are BS. Maybe if you turn the screen on super dim, wifi / bluetooth off, switch on econo-mode and read an ebook. In an even smaller netbook with about the same guts I bet battery life would be horrid.
For me this is the limit line between lap top and phone
I still think we might see a movement away from big phones, or people using two devices but not concurrently. For business use a decent netbook with 3G and bluetooth headset would be ideal, providing someone can actually one day make a battery that lasts a whole day yet doesn't have to be on wheels.
However, as useful as that'd be in work, it's not really a solution for how do I phone my missus to tell her I need to come home from the pub?
So I think a big device (with 3G or similar) for work and a small/tiny device (with radio and nothing else) for play/always. Aren't we at the point of a Bluetooth sized headset that has a phone in it? Or a comedy sized watch - aren't LG launching one soon?
The laptop would need to remain on (idling) the whole time, and they're just not designed for that today. In the end, having a laptop with 3G inside and a bluetooth "phone" or having a basic 3G phone and a laptop is not so different... you always need both parts.
I'm also using both a trinity and a Gigabeat F40. I just don't have the same response quickness, autonomy and storage on my trinity. So unless we get a pdaphone with a real battery life (something like 10 hours under heavy use), with 64GB of storage (it should arrive soon enough) and that doesn't struggle to playback a mp3 while surfing the net, I won't leave my loyal mp3 player at home.
I guess that 1 year from now I may find an appropriate device on the market.
The other day, i was sitting with my trusty Thinkpad T60p and my Galaxy S and suddenly i got this idea... i want to build a Android phone into the palmrest! So now i'm just throwing thoughts out the get myself started.
It would be great to have everything Conky provides now, calendar, email and other stuff, placed on a small LCD on the laptop.
So i need to get a spare palmrest for the laptop of eBay, in case the idea doesn't really work out, and a Android phone i can play around with. It seems as Windows Mobile phones are cheaper 2nd. hand, and as i don't really need the phone part of the phone to work, it might be the way to go. So what WinMo phones are good enough to run Android to get: booting into Android without user interaction, touchscreen and hardware buttons, maybe wifi and 3G, but only it it's good enough to provide a access point, USB net and Android 2.x?
What native Android phones should i look for? I think i'll need the hardware buttons to be on a separate PCB, a small (2,8" to 3.2") screen. CPU and memory isn't really that important. Also the LCD and main PCB needs to be quite flat. If i had brought a screwdriver to school, i could have measured just how flat.
Is there a launcher that can do everything in landscape mode?
Have anyone done something similar to this? Build a Android phone into anything else?
I need to modify the battery circuit to make to phone run of the laptop battery, as i don't think i can find internal room for it and connect the USB port in the phone to the internal USB header where my fingerprint reader isn't going to be anymore.
I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with Android phones (with HDMI out) and connecting them to a larger touchscreen (rather than a TV), and can the touchscreen then control the smartphone via the HDMI cable?
I should probably mention that my end goal here is to drop a 10" HDMI touchscreen in the car, and each time I enter the car I simply connect the phone to the touchscreen and then close the phone in the glovebox, basically using the touchscreen to remotely view and control all the phone features.
I'm afraid that HDMI does not support touch screen input. The type of touch screens you are referring to use either a USB or Serial (RS-232) connection to the computer, in addition to the video interface, to provide Touch Screen input. While I'm sure with a little digging there might be something like this to control your phone through a computer (My Mobiler allowed for this on Windows Mobile 5-6.5 phones through either USB or Bluetooth), I don't see being able to do this without a computer (or carputer) as it was, being involved.
So basically, the Triumph would need a USB host to get it done?
KryptoNyte39 said:
So basically, the Triumph would need a USB host to get it done?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, my guess would be that that would be the minimum requirement, as well as obviously some sort of driver support for what would essentially be "Mouse input".
I Think your best bet would be, if you could find an old netbook. One with a touch screen, you could use it as the link to you Phone. I know of 3 programs that let you output your Android phone to a computer monitor. All work on the MT and one lets you use your mouse and keyboard on the MT.
You can find the one I use here.
And if you want to try and make your on touch screen for a netbook take a look at this link. would make for a fun project.
For the other programs have a look at Ashot and [email protected]. All work with my MT.
Thanks, folks. I was kind of eyeballing this thing;
http://www.mo-co-so.com/Double-DIN-Lilliput-669GL-70NP-C-T-7-Touch-Screen-p/mcs-lil-669-dd.htm
But based on what's working right now, the Lilliput screen would still only be a display, and I'd still be controlling it from the phone somehow.
I'm not a programmer I'm afraid, but based on the current state of car stereos, I'm amazed Android hasn't progressed into this market rapidly. Let's face it, Pioneer's current $1000+ head units have just a fraction of the capabilities of my $129 Optimus V.
I considered an Android based head unit, but I think the better path is to be able to tether to the phone when you enter the car in some fasion, and then just simply use the larger in-car display to view the Android device and control it from the touchscreen. In this fashion, I don't need yet another Android device, and the in-car unit is basically without much logic. I'm afraid we might be a couple years out yet.
Yeah, such a panel like that wouldn't really work all that well for your application. The aspect ratio of the panel isn't ideal, and it appears the touchscreen works off a serial interface. Even worse, it is a resistive panel (which is leaps and bounds worse than the capacitive touch panels we're used to on our modern phones). Overall I think even if you did wire something up the experience would be fairly lack luster.
Todd42 said:
I Think your best bet would be, if you could find an old netbook. One with a touch screen, you could use it as the link to you Phone. I know of 3 programs that let you output your Android phone to a computer monitor. All work on the MT and one lets you use your mouse and keyboard on the MT.
You can find the one I use here.
And if you want to try and make your on touch screen for a netbook take a look at this link. would make for a fun project.
For the other programs have a look at Ashot and [email protected]. All work with my MT.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Todd, I hear what you're sayin'. I actually have an old netbook that I hopped up with an SSD. I'm wondering about stowing the netbook, rigging up some kind of start button, and then forming a MIMO monitor into the dash ...
http://www.mimomonitors.com/
(just throwing some ideas around in case it spurs another person's inspiration)
Hey guys
After a notable absence of Android in my life I'm heading back over with a TF300T. Now, as you may guess from the title I want to talk about my various connection options and draw from your experiences with the device to help me make the right choice in terms of getting my new baby online outside my house.
Obviously I could have gotten a device with built in modem but nothing really turned my head in terms of price and stuff, and as I recall just buying a device that just does what you want it to do already isn't really the Android spirit; half the fun is getting there.
Anyway, this leaves me with a number of imperfect options for data connections:
My phone will happily tether up to the tablet and because my network are cool dudes I can do that for free. Problem is that doing so means I can't make/recieve calls and texts while I'm tethered up and since I want mobile data love when I'm out of the house working that would seem to not be a great idea.
Secondly I could jump in with a mobile wifi thing, but I'm really not keen to get a another contract to make that happen and the amounts of data I'm likely to use (literally just web browsing for now and forever) are somewhat low and somewhat infrequent, making this seem to be a pretty bad useage of money. Also with devices offering 'Up to 5 hours of battery life'; well lets just that's not going to last me long enough to be useful.
Finally, I can grab a 3G USB stick and duck tape it to the device. It's the right stuff for my requirements, but it seems kinda non-trivial to hook up a USB device to the undocked tablet and certainly it seems totally unrealistic to wander around holding the tablet with usb adapter, then modem dongle sticking six inches out of the bottom. At worst it'll fall out, at best I'll break it. In the dock this looks great, assuming it'll work in the standard USB port, but outside it just seems silly.
My hope really was that I'd be able to find a cable that'd go from the propitiatory connector (Bad Asus!) to female usb so I could potentially stick the dongle flat against the back of the tablet without noticeably increasing it's footprint, but that seems unlikely. I've seen a guy on youtube who can make such a cable, but it takes soldering and that's somewhat outside my abilities.
So what kind of approach had you guys taken and what experiences have you had using this kind of ghetto-interweb solution? The key is to find the right add on that will let me still use my phone properly, that will give me long endurance but also minimal hassle... A bit of a reach really, but maybe I'm not thinking of all the options.
Apologies if anyone thinks this is in the wrong place, my XDA-fu is a little rusty but I'm pretty sure I'm in the right place. I've googled around and while I can find plenty of stuff telling me all the ways to hook the internet up, no-one seems to be answering what way I should approach making it all happen.
Best choice for me has been a mifi. Look up a Huawei 585 or 589 and plug in a sim and away you go. You can get some very cheap rolling monthly contracts these days for data only plans.
How have you found the battery life to be in practice? Can I leave the thing switched on and get some reasonable proportion of a day out of it? My hope really is that the battery estimates they give are 'x hours of actual internetting' instead of 'x hours of being switched on'. If it'll just quietly sit and stay connected for most of a day then that'll probably be fine, but if I have to finesse the thing on and off all day long just to get past lunch time that sounds pretty bad for my situation.
SO lets start out with something I originally wrote on FB back on the 3rd June
--
Ok so it's time to jot down some feedback on my first weekend with the Gemini but first lets run through what I've got here altogether.
First up there's my works laptop.
Then there's my own laptop which is permanently connected to the living room TV via HDMI.
I have an iPad that gets used as a general web browsing device around the house.
My phone is a dual SIM Motorola G4+ used for both by personal & work SIMs (supplied by work)
So where have I found the Gemini fitting in?
Well mostly I've been using it as a replacement for the iPad, particularly liking using split screens in the horizontal layout.
I've also installed all the MS apps so I can connect to my works mails etc (we're on Office 365) and that all seems to be working nicely as well.
What I haven't really been using it for is phone calls and TBH I'm not sure I will. I have my personal SIM in here (which is my least used one) primarily so I can use it online whilst away from WiFi. Not particularly interested in pairing with a smart watch as I can't stand wearing a watch full stop (yes I know I'm odd).
Overall I'm very impressed with the speed and responsiveness of the Gemini and haven't even particularly noticed any of the reported problems with the space bar (that could be because I'm very much a 2 finger typist lol). Yes there are one or two characters you have to think about which key combo to press but the keyboard is very well marked and I find it very intuitive to use.
Battery life seems reasonable given the amount of time the screen is on and a full charge has been seeing me right through the day up until bedtime. Be interesting to see how it is on the odd day I have to go into the office (I predominantly work from home)
Tried the adaptive brightness but it annoyed me as it was very visibly hunting and simply adjust manually to suit(now I've learnt to be patient with the FN combo).
Running an RDP session to a remote computer is so much easier with the aid of a BT mouse and I like that I can if I choose output to the telly.
Would I recommend the Gemini? You bet your sweet bippy I would, just not as a phone replacement
--
So has anything really chnaged since then?
No not really and I would still recommend the Little Gem even though there have been a few SNAFUs/Gotchas.
The biggest of these was probably the first OTA update causing a bootloop but that was easily rectified by reflashing using the files/info supplied at Planet Computers.
Annoyingly although the external Silver Button worked pretty consistently originally since the latest OTA upgrade I've had nothing but problems with it using the default Google Assistant. I've since switched it to link to Saiy and that seems far more reliable.
I've been suffering a few random reboots but I'm 99% certain thats down to InTune (Im using this for work as a BYOD and there are policies enforced on the MS apps) throwing a hissy fit on trying to enforce enryption which you can't do on the Gemini.
One slightly annoying thing is I noticed the cover was not fitting quite as snugly as I liked after inserting the sim &(200gb) SD card, that's been easily resolved with a couple of tiny dobs of white tack (blue is also available)
The only other minor irritation is that it doesn't appear any of the carriers in the UK are set up to provide service via eSim yet other than to Apple Smartwatch (& possibly Samsung Gear)