My Android 4.0 Experience

As I mentioned in my previous post about my Android tablet, my plan was to upgrade it to 4.0 after using it with 2.3 for a while. I found the post about Android 4.0 beta on the forum on Teclast's official website and there's a link to download the RAR file. Un-rar the file and it contains instructions as well as binaries for the upgrade.

So, what do I like about Android 4.0 (beta)? To be honest, this doesn't seem to be a "must-have" upgrade for the time being (However, I could imagine a few years down the road, new apps won't run on 2.3 anymore. Just like a lot of iOS app these days requires 3.1 or even 4.0 or above.) The browser seems smoother and supports tabbed browsing (it's harder to switch between opened "windows" in the 2.3 browser) In addition, it doesn't require another app to turn on Airplane mode like 2.3. It is part of the "Settings"

The biggest problem with this beta upgrade though, is that it doesn't include the Market (where we download Apps) The closest "replacement" for the Market is freewarelovers.com. I found quite a few APK (App installer files. Simply double click in File Manager and it will install the corresponding app) I got other APK by Googling. And here is what I have installed:
-Youtube
-Chinese News Online
-PalmBookReader: 直讀中文(cBook) for some reason doesn't work even though I found its APK. This is its replacement.
-Amazon Kindle
-Rhapsody: it is the official app for the music streaming service. At first, playback always fails after playing a few seconds of each track and will skip to the next one. The problem kinda went away after I checked the box Advanced Settings->Disable track pre-loading
-Pandora
-GoKeyboard: this is the input method that replaced "Baidu input" that came with the tablet originally on 2.3. Not an exact replacement though because it uses Cangjie (倉頡) instead of hand writing recognition.
-XiiaLive Lite
-Facebook

Hopefully Teclast will release an "official" non-beta Android 4.0 upgrade that includes the Market in the near future. In the mean time, I'll keep using the beta (unless there's an app I need so bad that I have to revert back to 2.3, which could be done by downloading the firmware from Teclast)

A few good Apps

Talking about Android Apps here, this is a followup to my previous post. I've tried many free Apps in the past 2 weeks, a lot of them are just so-so or simply doesn't work, here are a few useful ones:
1) BBC News Reader: an "unofficial" BBC News app that could download articles for offline viewing.
2) CNN News: another "unofficial" app that works offline
3) Chinese News Online (HK): this app offers many different Chinese newspapers.
4) MoboPlayer: this is for playing back video in MKV format, which the built-in movie player cannot handle.
5) XiiaLive Lite: this is for listening to free streaming radio from ShoutCast. To make it work, I have to change Settings->Advanced Users->Internal stream engine from 'Off' to 'On' though.

Finally, there are a few games I like:
- 麻將天下
- GoldMiner
- SpeedCar
- AirPenquin