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October 22, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

CHUWI LapBook 14.1 Laptop Manufacturing Changes – Hardware at Launch vs Several Months Later

Products may evolve over time due to parts becoming phased out (EOL), so company often issues PCN (product change notices) to the company for example to replace eMMC flash that’s not manufactured anymore by a new one. They won’t change any advertised features, so the product specifications should remain the same. Reviewers normally get product from one of the first batch of production, and if you purchase the product a few months later, after carefully reading reviews, you may end up with a device slightly different. But in some cases, the company makes major changes, while still delivering the same advertised hardware specifications. That’s apparently the case for CHUWI LapBook 14.1 laptop. The photo below shows how it looked internally for the sample I reviewed. If you zoom on the photo, you’ll find an M.2 slot on the bottom of the right PCB, potentially allowing you to add an SSD […]

April 8, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

iPazzPort KP-810-35BTT Backlit Keyboard Features a Switchable Touchpad / Numpad Zone

I’ve read many people praise Logitech K400 Bluetooth keyboard for use with Android mini PCs, as it’s functional and costs just $25 on Amazon. I’ve just come across another similar keyboard with iPazzPort KP-810-35BTT that adds backlit keys and the touchpad zone can be switched to numpad by the touch of a button. Key features listed for the keyboard: Backlit QWERTY keyboard with touchpad supporting multi-touch and scrolling bar. Connectivity – Bluetooth 3.0; max distance: 10m Power Supply – 3x AAA Batteries Dimensions – 314 x 112.5 x 17mm Weight – 218g Material – ABS It’s a standard Bluetooh HID keyboard so it should work with any OS including Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OS, iOS… One possible downside is the lack of left / right mouse buttons. I have such touchpad without separate physical mouse buttons on Acer Aspire E5 laptop, and while a left click is easy to do, […]

February 18, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

ZRRO Android Game Console Includes a Hover and Touch Controller (Crowdfunding)

Android games are fun to play… on smartphones and tablets, but if you want to play such games on a TV screen via an Android mini PC, it can become more problematic, as most of the games were designed for touchscreen, so you have to be prepare to juggle between input devices.. In my reviews, I have to play Candy Crush Saga with an air mouse, and I switch to a wireless gamepad for racing games such as Riptide GP2 or Beach Buggy Racing, while some games are simply not playable at all without touch emulation, unless you install a software remote such as Droidmote on your smartphone, and use the latter as a controller, which may not be ideal either. ZRRO, an Israeli company, came with a new package comprised of an Android game console (ZRRO Box), and a game controller (ZRRO Pad) featuring a hover and touch surface […]

July 1, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

webOS Community Edition Release for HP TouchPad

Open webOS 1.0 is planned to be released in September 2012, but in the meantime, the development team has released an intermediate webOS “Community Edition” for the HP TouchPad. This code is different from the Open webOS project, and is composed of additional components from the current release of webOS for the TouchPad. The open webOS project team has been working with WebOS Internals to bring this release out for legacy TouchPad devices. Thanks to the release of the webOS Community Edition, it is now possible to learn how the TouchPad works, modify your TouchPad experience and then apply that to Open webOS 1.0 once it is released. The Community Edition only supports HP TouchPad, whereas Open webOS 1.0 release will enable the community to port webOS to different hardware platform, and add more features by using open source stacks such as BlueZ bluetooth and GStreamer. You’ll need to download […]

February 10, 2012February 10, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android Kernel Source Released for HP TouchPad

The CyanogenMod team has been working on an Android port for the HP TouchPad for a while, and although good progress has been made, the firmware is still considered alpha due to issues with hardware and driver support. There are 2 versions: CM 7 (Alpha) with Android 2.3 and CM 9 (Alpha) with Android 4.0. The CM7 version is more complete and stable than CM9. The Android port might be sped-up as following pressure from the developer community, Hewlett Packard has released the Android kernel source and some other GPL packages modified for the HP TouchPad. Apparently, HP used those for factory testing. The source code is available on github at https://github.com/dalingrin/hp-kernel-tenderloin/tree/hp-topaz-android “green” user at rootzwiki built the kernel binary which is available at http://crimea.edu/~green/TP/oss-db910-QC1065-Kernel.tar.bz2 They also have the source code for: androidvncserver: http://crimea.edu/~green/TP/oss_db910_vnc.tar.bz2 i2c-tools: http://crimea.edu/~green/TP/oss_db910_i2c.tar.bz2 Apparently all components needed are available, except the wifi driver (Atheros AR6003), which HP […]

October 14, 2011February 22, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Android 2.3.7 (Alpha) for HP TouchPad Has Been Released

CyanogenMod team has just released the CyanogenMod 7.1 port for the HP TouchPad. This is an initial alpha release, so there are still plenty of bugs and a few non-working features, but overall it should be in a state that you can at least play around with Android on your TouchPad. For this release they used a new experimental installer called the Alpha CyanogenMod Experimental Installer (ACMEInstaller). This installer will reorganize partitions on the flash (resize the WebOS media volume to make room for Android).ACMEInstaller will be used to install ClockworkMod Recovery, CyanogenMod 7.1 and the new Moboot bootloader. After installation you’ll be able to boot WebOS or Android (dual-boot). The firmware currently support the following features: GPU acceleration 1080p video playback Wifi(with caveats) Bluetooth(no headset profile) Touchstone dock support Audio As it is alpha, there are also plenty of known issues including: Higher than normal battery drain, ~2%/hr while […]

October 10, 2011October 10, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

CyanogenMod 7.1 Android Released

CyanogenMod Team has just released CyanogenMod 7.1 based on Android 2.3.7. The previous version (7.0.3) was released on the 6th of May 2011. CyanogenMod 7.1 Changelog Common: Android 2.3.7 (Google) Common: Bluetooth mouse support – Scott Brady Common: Improve notification swipe-to-clear – Evan Charlton Common: Improve album-artist support in media scanner – Paul Crovella Common: Profile improvements and bugfixes – Martin Long, Danny Baumann, Robert Burns Common: RTL text improvements – Eyad Aboulouz, Eran Mizrahi Common: Wake on volume key option – Sven Dawitz Common: Support for revoking application permissions – Plamen K. Kosseff Common: Latest Superuser app – ChainsDD Common: Control brightness by sliding on statusbar – Danesh M Common: Add “copy all” to context menu – Danesh M Common: Lockscreen haptic and statusbar indicators toggle – Danesh M Common: Nicer timepicker/datepicker – Jiri Tyr Common: Configuration 0/90/180/270 rotation – Jonas Larsson, Scott Brady Common: DSP Manager bugfixes and […]

September 10, 2011September 10, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Installing Android 2.3.5 on HP TouchPad

The instructions to install Android 2.3.5 (Pre-Alpha) on HP TouchPad have now been made available for developers by fnj00 (touch-droid community) who want to play with the system. N.B: Normal users should not install this version as this is a pre-alpha build and some features like wifi do not work. You can get the system dump and android.uImage at http://touch-droid.com/touch-droid.torrent or http://randomshit.dreamhosters.com/TouchPad/. This system dumps use the touch screen drivers recently made available by CyanogenMod Team. You’ll also need to install the Palm SDK in order to have Novaterm and Novacom installed on your computer. Then you’ll have to re-partition your flash to add one partition for Android and dump the system image to the new partition. Please visit Semi-working build of 2.3.5 on the HP TouchPad to get the step by step instructions to install Android 2.3.5 on your HP TouchPad. After installation, you’ll have a dual boot system […]